#MyFavFriday Sept 7, 2012 Try, Try Again

If you've been following along, you know that I've been reading about formative assessment.  One of the things that stuck with me from Dylan Wiliam's book Embedded Formative Assessment was about grading and comments.  In the research that he did, he found that there are three ways that teachers leave feedback.  One is to put a grade only on the paper.  The second is to write a comment only on the paper.  The last is to put both a grade and a comment.  What he found was that putting on a grade only OR putting on a grade and comments, produced the same results.  However, when a teacher only put comments on a paper and no grade, more often than not, the students responded to that more positively.


My Favorite Friday this week is the format of a practice sheet that I created.

My first though with this is that it was going to take me for-ev-er to write all these comments.  In order to manage that, I cut back on the amount of problems that I assigned.  I went from about 10 down to 3.  

Here's how the lesson went:

The class and I discussed how to find probability of simple events.  We did a few examples together.  As their exit ticket, I asked them to complete three problems and turn them in.  



This photo isn't the greatest.  But, in the first column I typed the problem.  In the second column, the students did their work individually.

Since there were about 10 minutes of class left (I did plan it that way, honestly), I randomly picked a student's paper, placed a sticky note over their name and put the paper under the document camera.  As a class we discussed if the problems were correct or not.  If the problem was correct, I wrote "Super!" or "You rock!" in the third column under the heading "Teacher Comments" and in the fourth column under "2nd Try" I put a big X, so they knew they had nothing more to do for that problem.  However, if the work was incorrect we discussed what I should write that would be a helpful comment.  

That night I finished writing all the comments and handed the papers back the next day.  The students read the comments I made, wrote their corrections in the 4th column and turned the paper in again.  

I have to say, the corrections were pretty good.  It was their first attempt at making corrections this year, let's see how it goes.  



This post got a little wordy on me.  So here is the format in a nutshell:

Column 1:  Type the problem
Column 2:  Student makes their first attempt at the problem
Column 3:  Teacher makes comments about the first attempt
Column 4:  Student makes corrections based on teacher's comments.

Suggestions:
Don't give more problems than you are willing to comment on.
Give the students time to fix their work.
Show students the difference between a helpful comment (Remember that the denominator is the amount of total outcomes) and a not-so helpful comment (Read the problem again).


Comments

  1. This sounds like an awesome method! Thank you for sharing :)

    ReplyDelete

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