In teaching and in life we rely on feedback to inform us of what we're doing well and what areas need improvement. In proficiency based teaching, feedback takes many different forms but is critical to the growth of student language skills. Trying to condense this topic into a blog post is pretty much impossible. So we're going to talk about ways to give oral corrective feedback, rubrics and comments on writing and speaking. Oral Corrective Feedback: For so many years, when a student would speak and say something incorrect they would be corrected immediately. I can picture classrooms I've been in as a student or observer where a kid says "yo comer el almuerzo" and the teacher stops the class to teach about the conjugations of the verb comer and how that's an infinitive which means "to eat" but the kid meant to say "I ate" which is the preterite...bla bla bla. That's what the kid hears. Bla bla bla. The research on oral corrective feedback is so varied and quite honestly no one has the "right answer" for this topic. Here are a few of the ways to provide oral corrective feedback and some examples. All of these come from Glisan & Donato's book Enacting The Work Of Language Instruction.
Rubrics: This is another topic I could talk about for years. When grading written or oral performance assessments, gone are the days of assigning a number grade arbitrarily because it sounded like B level work. A rubric is a contract between you and your students. In this contract you're explaining what you're looking for and how to measure their performance on this assessment. When planning your rubric, I stick to no more than 5 categories to give meaningful feedback on how learners are progressing. Here's a copy of our department's presentational writing rubric (and it's not a perfect rubric by any means. It works for the time being and we are constantly making tweaks and adjustments) For each of our courses we have a proficiency/performance target that we are aiming for. Based on the target, we choose the areas of the rubric to focus on. So if our goal is Intermediate Mid then we will copy that part of the rubric and set that as our "meets expectations" which will score a B in our online grading system. Looking at the categories we have 5 maximum that we focus on. They are comprehension, vocabulary, text type, cultural awareness and language control. These are based heavily on the ACTFL Performance Descriptors which help us determine what we're looking for at each sub level of proficiency. Creating a rubric takes a lot of time so my suggestion is to look around to see who has rubrics that can give you a starting place and go from there. Scoring on a rubric is another challenge that takes time. The more you do it the more accustomed you are to it but at the same time you always want to be checking in with colleagues to see how your scoring compares to theirs. Here are some places to start looking for rubrics: •Ohio Department of Education •ACTFL Benchmark Descriptors •Jefferson County Rubric •South Carolina Interpersonal Rubric •South Carolina Presentational Rubric •Howard County Rubric Other rubric blogs/ideas to look into: •Rubric Repair •Holistic vs Analytic Rubrics •Single Point Rubrics •I've Never Met A Rubric I Liked Comments on Writing and Speaking: Once you've scored the writing or speaking assessment it's time to provide feedback. John Hattie states that teachers should be using "dollops of feedback" which means not correcting every single thing and not providing a laundry list of areas to improve. Learners can realistically handle 2-3 pieces of constructive feedback at most if it is geared toward helping learners grow. In our department, we use glow and grow feedback at the bottom of all of our rubrics. These are a series of pre-written comments that allow teachers and learners to see what was done really well (glow) and what areas to work on for next time (grow). Here's an example: So for a student, I would read through their essay and highlight areas of glow and areas of grow and then score them on the rubric. I then want to give them an action plan so I make sure to fill this out with great detail. I'll start by always finding what they did well. I want them to know that, grades aside, there are areas of strength in their writing. I then want every student to know there is always room to grow and I want them to know what I want them to work on for next time. Again, I'll choose 2-3 maximum pieces of feedback so that kids have a reasonable amount to focus their attention on.
If the feedback stops here, then it's not actually feeding forward. I make students remember their feedback, use their feedback in class, reflect on their feedback and, before taking the next assessment, I make them write down a goal for the newest assessment based on previous feedback. That way students know it's not just about the grade and it's actually about the growth.
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