An English Teacher's Toolbox

world-shaker:

This is by far one of my favorite posts of the year, and the best I’ve seen on feedback in a long time. It’s worth the time it takes to read and re-read (and you should re-read it).

I stole my scaffold for peer and self-assessment from Geoff Petty. I think he’s great because he shares so many wonderful resources for free online. Petty argues that too much of the feedback we give students is BACKWARD looking and often this feedback is quantitative (numerical e.g. 7/10; 70%), but even qualitative feedback (words e.g. ‘You didn’t begin your sentences with a capital letter.’) more often than not looks backwards at what WAS done or, typically, WASN’T done. Petty advocates for a method of feedback that is both backwards and forwards looking, and to do that he uses the ‘goals, medals, missions‘ protocol. It’s really neat because the language is accessible to all age groups and is non-threatening. Essentially the ‘goals’ are the criteria for the product (be it a short film, an essay or a presentation) and the ‘medals’ are what has been achieved (this is the backward looking stuff) and always takes the form of positive statements, e.g. ‘Your introduction is strong.’ The ‘missions’ are the important part of the protocol – this is ‘feed-forward’ as it is looking at what the student needs to work on to improve the product.