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Objectives
-I can engage in a collegial conversation and share ideas  around giving effective feedback online.
-I can participate in personal reflection and goal-setting.

Agenda
-Inclusion Activity: Poll

-Dilemma Protocol

-Reflection and Feedback

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Step 1- Facilitator poses dilemma: "How might we give effective feedback online in order to improve student learning?"
Step 2- Writing. Everyone writes about the problem from their own point of view. (5-7 minutes)

MOVE INTO SMALL GROUPS
Step 3- Share the reflections. In breakout rooms, each person has the opportunity to explain their own approach to the problem from their writing,
and they are written in bullet form on padlet.
Step 4- Probing questions. Each member of the group has an opportunity to ask a probing question of any other group member
or members (See Pocket Guide to Probing Questions). It is important that each person in the group
gets the chance to respond to at least one probing question.

MOVE BACK TO LARGE GROUP
Step 5- Sharing to synthesize. One person from each group shared out one or two ideas from the group.
Step 6 - Next steps conversation. Ideas for next steps toward addressing the dilemma is shared in chat.
Step 7 - Debrief. Emoji in chat.

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Probing Questions
• What do you feel is right?
• What’s another way you might…?
• How is…different from…?
• What sort of an impact do you think…?
• How might your assumptions about…have influenced how you are thinking about…?
• What is the best thing that could happen?

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FUTURE DILEMMA: How can we find ways to give feedback that are SUSTAINABLE and effective. (How much is too much? This takes A LOT of TIME!)
-Kaizena or other apps to make my time investment more efficient

-listening to what students need

-would love ideas about what tech platforms to use

--Metacognition
-Voice recorded feedback :)
-Best questions to ask kids to be sure our feedback transfers.
-Kaizena / Audio feedback
-Voice comments & provide them immediately
-Peer feedback/group feedback and live feedback if time permits

-Be productive, short / small tasks
-In terms of frequently asked questions could we have a list of frequently made comments for the students to read.  Questions that they can read to see if they apply to them.  That way they can reflect personally without making the same comment over and over again directly to each student.
-meeting one by one
-cynthia’s group’s idea of allowing students to re-submit work after having received feedback is obviously an essential step for learning… but in this online system, it is quite overwhelming for the teacher to imagine assessing the same assignment means we’re not moving to new material… and content has slowed down a lot already

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Compilation of ideas shared.
-have time to give feedback
-that it's timely
-highlight the positive, showing examples is helpful
-focused and specific - differentiated for each student
-small steps, not just at the end
-struggle as a teacher to keep it brief
-leaving 15 minutes at the end of each live session (oral feedback)
-peer feedback in breakout rooms while teachers and coteachers pop in and out so that kids can support each other
-written feeback
-able to manage more feedback now
-oral feedback feels more effective (and more time consuming)

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so much longer to give feedback online

(English and Math and Health and Music

time just opening each document)

all the theories we knew previously are just theories... now we have to learn again how to do this

always more to do: never-ending email and tasks

lower expectations for final outcomes of the class (content)

go-formative (Sunita)... you can give feedback to all the students at once... but you have to type it and upload it. TAKES TIMES

flip grid- (Matt) video and audio...  takes a long time to load

google written feedback with details (All)

one-on-one live meetings (Seba)with each student (helps keep a connection with each student)

voice comments kaizena (Madrelle)

late work is hard to deal with

checklists and peer review

Zoom breakout rooms for peer feedback

Facetime, Zoom, Whatsapp.... Students meet in pairs via whatever means they want

-expect less work from students
- indiv. feedback is best.  Make time to talk face to face online w/ students
-flip grid takes a while to upload the comments.  What is an alternative?
-go formative is good for math...uploading takes too much time
- peer feedback in groups (breakout or facetime/student choice)

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Compilation of ideas shared.
- brief directed to each student for their needs
- comments delivered through a shared document or orally through an online platform synchronously or asynchronously
- scheduled interviews with students
- comments on work through seesaw
- based on standards and student goals
- oriented to make the students reflect rather than directing them
- learning is more personalized than when we are in front of the classroom but it requires more work from the teacher's perspective.  Where is the limit to what we can or should commit?

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Compilation of ideas shared.
- suggestions on Google docs, links with more information to enhance understanding
- depending if it's oral or written
- frequent
- immediate feedback is more important online, one week later is too late
- clear, concrete, specific (using Google comments)
- possibility to improve on the assignment following feedback
- feedback  between students, for example multiple students give feedback to one and/or one gives feedback to multiple students (specific assigned helpers, note-takers)
- hard to stay organized and know where to find student work, using turnitin because of ease and give feedback there
- need to create more of a feedback loop
- have students complete smaller assignments to give feedback to all by collecting on shared doc (on shared screen), while correcting their answers in the moment
- give group feedback by showing common errors and correcting them collectively

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Flash Feedback: How to Provide More Meaningful Feedback in Less Time

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Listen to the Interview with Matthew Johnson:
Sponsored by Parlay and ViewSonic

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

My study of feedback began in earnest on a sunny afternoon during my third year of teaching. I was living in California - much to the envy of my midwestern friends and family - but I was also harboring a secret, a secret that was troubling me that afternoon. The secret was that while my social media pictures showed me at the beach and hiking past redwoods, those excursions were rare, maybe once-a-quarter outings. Instead, the vast majority of my days were spent doing exactly what I was doing in that moment: responding to and grading papers.

For the better part of my first three years as a teacher, student papers acted as the chains that shackled me to my desk day after day. Like Tantalus, I could see the beach gleaming through a crack between the apartment buildings next to mine, but when I looked at the towers of student work in front of me, the sand and waves receded out of reach. Maybe tomorrow after I chop these essay stacks down I would tell myself once again.

That afternoon though, for reasons I don't fully understand, something inside me finally snapped and I admitted to myself what I'd long known unconsciously: I didn't want to live like this anymore. I was drowning, submerged under a never-ending torrent of student work in need of feedback and assessment. I didn't want to leave the classroom, but I also didn't want to stay if it meant that my next forty years would endlessly orbit stacks of student work in the way that my first three years did.

That night, in a last-ditch effort to stay a teacher, I began to read whatever I could find about responding faster and better to student work, and it didn't take long for me to realize that I was far from the first teacher to resent living a life with papers at its geographic center. In fact, the very first article of the very first volume of the The English Journal in 1912 begins with a simple question written in all caps: CAN GOOD COMPOSITION TEACHING BE DONE UNDER THE PRESENT CONDITIONS?

The answer given by the author, Dr. Edwin M. Hopkins? "No." There were simply too many students and papers to manage. By the way, it is worth noting that Dr. Hopkins had 100 students. I currently have 158.

And the problem is that Dr. Hopkins wasn't fully wrong, then or now. The issue largely comes down to feedback, which is an essential part of good teaching-not just for composition, but for any content area. Just like the conditions in Dr. Hopkins' time, our present conditions make providing quality feedback incredibly difficult. This is because effective feedback generally shares a handful of characteristics: It is given regularly, returned in a timely manner, and written in clear language. It also works best when students are in the midst of creation, as opposed to as a postscript on final drafts once they finish.

When one digs down, the logistics of providing regular, timely, and formative feedback are absurd when one has 158 or even 100 students. Take my classes: Each minute of feedback I provide to each of my 158 students takes a time investment of over two and a half hours. That means reading and responding to one essay or project or test in ten minutes-a blisteringly fast speed based on the teachers I've talked to-will take over 25 hours. Even if a teacher works 60 or 70 hours, sacrificing countless evenings and weekends to student work, there exists a hard cap on the amount of feedback a teacher can give if it's only given in big chunks on big assignments.

Of course more global feedback on larger assignments is important, and there are ways to get more efficient and effective with that feedback (I wrote a book largely on this subject, Flash Feedback: Responding to Student Writing Better and Faster-Without Burning Out, and this very site has excellent suggestions here, here, and here), but if teachers want to provide timely, regular, formative, and meaningful feedback, we need to diversify our practices.

Feedback, after all, is just a teacher's response to something, and we can meaningfully respond to different assignments in a multitude of ways, many of them only taking a minute or two. I call these practices Flash Feedback, and while they come in small packages, they can pack a serious educational punch.

Characteristics of Flash Feedback

Teachers can take countless approaches to Flash Feedback. The exact structures will depend on the discipline, students, and teacher, but the most efficient and effective Flash Feedback tends to share these four characteristics:

It focuses on one or two learning objectives. A long history of scholarship argues that feedback, even on large assignments, should generally focus only on a manageable number of topics, no more than a few. Covering too many topics tends to overload students, so they learn no lessons (or no lessons deeply) and it takes longer, making it the exact opposite of Flash Feedback.

Students do the heavy lifting. Teachers often fall into the trap of correcting work for students and doing more reflection on student work than they require the students to do. Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle call this Helicopter Teaching, and while it generally comes from a place of wanting to help, it often holds students back for two reasons: First, when students don't have to work for an answer, they are less likely to remember it. Second, the time it takes to correct student work and solve problems for the students severely limits how much feedback the teacher can give them. For Flash Feedback to work, students must be the primary ones finding answers, patterns, and approaches, as the teacher plays the role of the guide standing well off to the side.

It utilizes systems and technology. Feedback often has a lot of redundancies that can be mitigated with better systems or by using technology, and even little efficiencies add up. For me, each 15 second increase in efficiency saves me 40 minutes when taken on the scale of all of my students!

There is a spillover plan and time allotted for special cases. There will inevitably be times when a student's specific needs won't fit within the system and structure being used by the teacher. This is why having a clearly defined spillover plan/time will help to make sure that the needs of one or two individuals don't derail the plan for the rest of the class.

Three Ways to Do Flash Feedback

In my classes, and especially during the time when I'm writing this-an era of emergency distance learning when time is tight-there are three types of Flash Feedback that I find myself coming to again and again: Targeted Response, Micro-Conferences, and Wise Interventions.

1. Targeted Response

My students, like most people, tend to struggle with comma usage. My approach to helping them with commas used to be to circle and correct every comma error I found in every paper, but this never led to much progress and it took a tremendous amount of time.

Now I mainly use Targeted Response, which is where the teacher focuses an assignment and its feedback solely on 1 to 2 targeted learning goals. When it comes to commas, my students write a very short one-page paper about anything they want in any genre. It is called the Comma Paper, and its only criteria (and the only thing I give feedback to) is that they must include at least four correctly used examples of each type of comma we studied in class.

To speed my assessment of and response to these papers, I have students turn them in on Google Classroom. That enables me to use the Find Function (Command-F) to highlight all of the commas in the piece, so I can quickly scan for comma issues. It also allows me to pre-populate two comments in the comment bank (if you don't know how to do this, here is a quick tutorial). One is a short congratulatory note for students who had no comma errors. The other is a message where I tell students the number of comma errors and let them know that to get credit for the assignment, they must find the errors and fix them during the class time provided.

By keeping the scope of the paper and feedback focused and using the technology tools available, I can give specific, individual, and meaningful feedback in less than a minute per student, and the best part is that the deep focus on commas leads to more student growth in one short paper than a year of circling and correcting commas ever did!

2. Micro-Conferences

Conferencing is one of the most celebrated pedagogical tools, and there is good reason for that. It is a rare one-on-one opportunity to offer individualized instruction and feedback, fix misconceptions, build relationships, and give students the opportunity to be heard by a caring adult. Like written feedback though, the logistics of conferences can be daunting in most classes. My classes meet for 210 minutes each week and average 32 students. This means doing a five minute conference with each student takes over 75 percent of the class time that week.

While larger conferences are sometimes worth this time investment for me, I can only do so many if I want to cover everything else I need to do. Enter the Micro-Conference, which is a conference that is done in a fraction of the time (generally 1 to 2 minutes) by being focused and carefully structured.

One of my favorites is one I do around paraphrasing, which is another deeply important skill that students tend to struggle with. Here's how it works:

1. Students write a rough draft of a paper with paraphrasing, like a research paper, and bring it to class.

2. As a whole class, we read and discuss mentor texts with strong paraphrasing.

3. Students take out their own drafts, pick a page to work with, and then highlight each moment of paraphrasing they see.

4. They then rate their paraphrasing in their paper from 1 to 10, based on the mentor text we read, and write at least four sentences justifying their rating.

5. Once students have rated and reflected on their work, they call me over and we quickly conference. I generally start conferences by asking students to share their ratings and what they noticed when comparing their work to the example. We then use those thoughts to plan an actionable path forward together. My role in this is mainly that of the gadfly - asking questions and helping the student to orient in the right direction - and while I try to keep the conferences to no more than a minute, most generally wrap up naturally in that time without feeling rushed.

Like the Targeted Response, everything about these conferences is designed to maximize time efficiency. The students have already laid the groundwork and highlighted the paraphrased sections, allowing us to jump right in at a high level. Further, by focusing just on paraphrasing, a minute is not too short to go deep, answer questions, and figure out meaningful action steps forward for the student.

3. Wise Interventions

Wise Interventions is a practice that came out of Stanford and the University of Virginia, among others, and the idea behind it is that while shifting negative student mindsets, beliefs, and behaviors is often painstakingly slow, in the right circumstances it can also happen incredibly quickly. The key to these moments of rapid positive change is that if teachers can find the exact moments that fuel and perpetuate negative student beliefs/mindsets/behaviors and disrupt them, sometimes it can open students up to better alternatives in surprisingly little time.

Probably the most famous example of this was a study of Massachusetts middle schools that found that students did twice as much revision on an essay when they each received a sticky note on the top of their essays that read "I'm giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them," versus those who got a sticky note that read "I'm giving you these comments so that you'll have feedback on your paper."

The researchers theorized that the reason for why one sticky note-the product of no more than a few seconds work - would have such a large effect on student mindsets and behavior was that many students in the study might have felt the teachers didn't believe in them. Those narratives were disrupted by a note coming just at the moment they were preparing for teacher disappointment once again via the teacher comments, which in turn cleared the way for those students to put in more work.

I use a number of Wise Interventions in my classes, but my favorite with feedback is one called "I'm so sorry about the rain." It comes from Daniel Coyle's book The Culture Code, and the basic premise is that a study out of Harvard found that people were 422% more likely to let a stranger borrow their phone if the stranger prefaced asking for the phone by saying "I'm so sorry about the rain." The reason this rather banal comment about the weather led to a striking shift in behavior was likely that it was enough to signal a relationship, which changes nearly everything about how a brain responds to a request.

I have found that little personal things that take only a few seconds to write-like quickly referencing something a student said in class or an aspiration the student shared at some point-can often have the same effect on students, especially those who are wary of writing, and shift the attention and care they give to feedback on that paper and beyond.

By being focused and carefully structured, Flash Feedback allows us to make feedback a part of class that is as regular as the bells in the halls. It also allows us to teach many more personalized lessons each semester; gives us regular points of contact with students, which have been shown to improve performance and relationships; and best of all, can be done quickly, allowing teachers to break those shackles to student papers and take a day at the beach every once in a while.

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Flash Feedback: How to Provide More Meaningful Feedback in Less Time

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If we want to provide timely, regular, formative, and meaningful feedback, we need to diversify our practices. These three strategies pack a lot of punch in very little time.

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Resources:                   Strategies for Personalizing Feedback Online    

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Resources:                   Strategies for Personalizing Feedback Online    

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Feedback is one of the most powerful tools teachers have in their "teaching toolbelts" for guiding learners toward mastery. Without feedback, students do not have a clear sense of what they are doing well, what they need to focus on, and what they can do to improve.

Despite the power of timely and actionable feedback, it is easy to neglect. Providing feedback is time-consuming and often takes a back seat to other aspects of our work. Teachers must find ways to give feedback that are sustainable and effective. In the absence of face-to-face classes, teachers can communicate they care about their students' progress by providing them with feedback on their work. When done well, feedback can strengthen the relationship that online teachers have with their students.

Research indicates that using media, beyond text comments, positively impacts the students' perception of the quality of feedback. Online students who received audio feedback perceived that feedback as more thorough, detailed, and personal than text feedback (Voelkel & Mello, 2014). Students also reported being more motivated by audio and video feedback because it was clear and personalized (Voelkel & Mello, 2014; Henderson & Phillips, 2015). Interestingly, teachers also reported higher levels of engagement when giving video and audio feedback.

Below are three strategies teachers working online can use to give students more focused and personalized feedback.

#1 Hosting Real-time Feedback Sessions Using Video Conferencing Software

In my most recent book, Balance with Blended Learning, I have a chapter dedicated to providing real-time feedback as students work. I encourage teachers to use blended learning models to create time and space in the classroom to give feedback on their students' work as they work. Too often, feedback is given on finished products when there is no real incentive for students to do anything with that feedback. Instead, I would like teachers to focus on supporting the process and providing students with actionable feedback they can use to improve their work before the teacher assesses it.

Teachers working exclusively online can adapt this real-time feedback strategy for the online environment with video conferencing software. If students are working on a formal writing assignment or project, teachers can schedule 5-minute feedback sessions with individual students. During these real-time feedback sessions, teachers can provide students with feedback about their work. Where do they see evidence of growth? Which aspects of the work would benefit from further development? Where are the gaps or missing elements?

In these sessions, teachers can share their screens and project the student's work as they discuss it. Students have the opportunity to ask questions if something is unclear or request additional instruction or support. These real-time feedback sessions can help online teachers develop a stronger relationship with their students. Students are likely to feel more "seen" in an online course where they have regular feedback sessions with their teacher.

Teachers working with secondary students can use scheduling software, like Calendy, to streamline the sign-up process for real-time feedback sessions.

#2 Video Comments with Screencastify

Teachers may not be able to require their students to attend a live feedback session or they may want to give students a choice between synchronous and asynchronous feedback. In that case, they can record a short screencast using Screencastify to give students feedback on their work. The free version of Screencastify allows users to record up to five-minute videos, which should be plenty for an asynchronous feedback session.

Teachers can pull up the students' work on their computer screens, click the Screencastify Chrome Extension, select desktop recording, and record their feedback. As they provide feedback, they can highlight specific elements of the student's work, so the feedback is easier to follow.

When the recording is finished, it will save automatically in Google Drive. Teachers can share the link to the recording directly with the student.

#3 Audio Comments with Kaizena

Teachers who want to experiment with attaching audio comments to their student work should try Kaizena, a Google add-on. Once installed Kaizena is easy to navigate and use. However, there are a few tricks to using Kaizena successfully. First, you will need to install Kaizena and ask your students to install it so they can access your audio comments.

The second thing to keep in mind is that the free version of Kaizena limits teacher audio comments to 30-seconds. At first, I found this challenging, but I got used to articulating one thought in each audio comment. In talking with students, it turns out they like having the feedback separated into individual audio comments because they found it more manageable. They were able to focus on one comment at a time as they were working on revising their writing.

As students listen to the audio comments remotely, they can click the comments and post a reply directly to an audio comment if they have a question. This creates another avenue for teachers and students to communicate about their work and their progress.

Feedback that feels personalized is more likely to inspire students to continue working to develop their skills. As teachers play with these strategies and leverage different types of media to provide feedback, it is important to remember that "less is more." Giving students a laundry list of items to work on can be overwhelming. Instead, try to keep feedback focused on one or two elements of their work and make it clear how they can act on that feedback. What can they specifically do to improve their work? The more focused and actionable the feedback, the more likely students are to use it.

If you have other strategies for giving feedback online, please take a moment and post a comment!

Henderson, M., & Phillips, M. (2015). Video-based feedback on student assessment: Scarily personal. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 31(1).

Voelkel, S., & Mello, L. V. (2014). Audio feedback-better feedback?. Bioscience Education, 22(1), 16-30.

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3 Strategies for Personalizing Feedback Online

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Feedback is one of the most powerful tools teachers have in their 'teaching toolbelts' for guiding learners toward mastery. Without feedback, students do not have a clear sense of what they are doing well, what they need to focus on,