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A systematic plan with a shared vision for school effectiveness and student learning through the infusion of information and communication technology (ICT) and digital learning resources.

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The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) (20 U.S.C. § 1232g; 34 CFR Part 99) is a Federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. The law applies to all schools that receive funds under an applicable program of the U.S. Department of Education.

FERPA gives parents certain rights with respect to their children's education records. These rights transfer to the student when he or she reaches the age of 18 or attends a school beyond the high school level. Students to whom the rights have transferred are "eligible students."

Parents or eligible students have the right to inspect and review the student's education records maintained by the school. Schools are not required to provide copies of records unless, for reasons such as great distance, it is impossible for parents or eligible students to review the records. Schools may charge a fee for copies.

Parents or eligible students have the right to request that a school correct records which they believe to be inaccurate or misleading. If the school decides not to amend the record, the parent or eligible student then has the right to a formal hearing. After the hearing, if the school still decides not to amend the record, the parent or eligible student has the right to place a statement with the record setting forth his or her view about the contested information.

Generally, schools must have written permission from the parent or eligible student in order to release any information from a student's education record. However, FERPA allows schools to disclose those records, without consent, to the following parties or under the following conditions (34 CFR § 99.31):

School officials with legitimate educational interest;

Other schools to which a student is transferring;

Specified officials for audit or evaluation purposes;

Appropriate parties in connection with financial aid to a student;

Organizations conducting certain studies for or on behalf of the school;

Accrediting organizations;

To comply with a judicial order or lawfully issued subpoena;

Appropriate officials in cases of health and safety emergencies; and

State and local authorities, within a juvenile justice system, pursuant to specific State law.

Schools may disclose, without consent, "directory" information such as a student's name, address, telephone number, date and place of birth, honors and awards, and dates of attendance. However, schools must tell parents and eligible students about directory information and allow parents and eligible students a reasonable amount of time to request that the school not disclose directory information about them. Schools must notify parents and eligible students annually of their rights under FERPA. The actual means of notification (special letter, inclusion in a PTA bulletin, student handbook, or newspaper article) is left to the discretion of each school.

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policy; privacy; academic records; technical assistance; parent rights; student rights; ferpa

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Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)

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Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) Home Page.

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These technologies can review tons of data sets to find patterns and identify anomalies that do not align with the set security measures. They can be set to flag and prevent potential threats, allowing security teams to review the flagged actions and determine whether they are within the set organizational parameters. For example, a bank can flag a transaction if it does not align with the customer's historical transactions. Once a customer proves their identity and reassures the bank that they have initiated the transaction, the bank can allow the money to move from their account.

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Data and Online Security - Protecting Digital Environments - Online Security & Control Organizations

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Technological advancements have paved the way for simplified access to online resources. People can work from home, communicate with loved ones, store data securely, enjoy entertainment on the go, and bank through digital platforms. While these opportunities have several benefits, they are subject to data and online security issues.

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General Overview of FERPA information regarding the rights of students.

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As a teacher, children's librarian or school administrator, you are faced with providing a new level of guardianship to the children whom you educate. Now that the internet is so fully integrated into the educational process, it is your responsibility to protect the personal information of your minor students from being shared (either by the school administration or by the students themselves).

Federal privacy regulations with acronyms like FERPA and CIPA might make your school district's attorneys edgy, but compliance with these regulations can be achieved in a very straightforward way, through the combination of Google Apps for Education and an integrated cloud-based security platform. Here's an overview of how today's schools and libraries can keep student information safe:

Understanding FERPA

The letters in FERPA stand for Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. This law, also known as the "Buckley Act," has been on the books since 1974, long before anyone imagined the internet. It was enacted in order to give students and their parents the right to inspect and correct a student's educational records. The law also governs who else (besides the student and parents) is legally allowed to see the student's record.

FERPA governs the privacy of students' academic records

Since FERPA was enacted before the internet sprayed information in all directions, the law was less focused on HOW records might be shared or released, and more focused on WHO might have access to them. FERPA includes a list of nine different entities who are allowed access to student records without student or family consent. By establishing this list of permitted recipients, FERPA effectively makes student records off-limits to everyone else (unless the student or family requests in writing that the records be released.)

Who is allowed access to student records under FERPA?

Under FERPA, the permitted recipients of student records and information are officials of the school itself or other schools to which a student might transfers; researchers or auditors who might be examining records in the course of their work; financial aid or accreditation officials; and various representatives of the government or the justice system. This is just a descriptive overview - any institution that's in the process of setting up their compliance system will want to have your lawyer review the fine print and make sure that access is granted only to people who are entitled to it by law.

Additional FERPA regulations about student information

FERPA has a few additional minor clauses that further define those who are allowed to see student information. For example, it allows schools to produce student directories, which list names and addresses and phone numbers. These directories are also allowed to list dates of attendance, birth dates, and awards or honors received. However, parents and adult students do have the right to control the release of this information, which means that schools must give them a way to "opt out" of such directories. Schools are also required to inform student's families about their rights to privacy under FERPA every year.

Of course, a student may actually want their academic records released - to an employer, perhaps, or some other private party. This is always possible; it simply requires that the adult student or the parent or guardian of a minor student must give consent in writing for this disclosure.

What is CIPA?

CIPA is also concerned with protecting student information, although it has other purposes as well. The letters in CIPA stand for Children's Internet Protection Act, and this law was passed by Congress in 2000 and updated in 2011.

CIPA prevents children from sharing their own personal information

To comply with CIPA, schools and libraries are required to develop a way to keep minor children from disclosing personal information when using email and other direct online communication. CIPA also requires teachers and librarians to monitor the online activity of minors, preventing them from accessing harmful or obscene material and blocking them from engaging in "hacking" or other illegal activities.

CIPA compliance is tied to federal funding - specifically, the E-rate program. This program provides affordable internet services to schools and libraries.

So, those are the basics of FERPA and CIPA; both laws center around a new form of protection and supervision which schools are expected to provide for children.

Both acts govern the circulation of PII

PII, or Personally Identifiable Information, is at the heart of both CIPA and FERPA. PII is a term coined by the U.S. government that refers to "information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual's identity." This is exactly the information that can put people of any age at risk when it is shared with unauthorized recipients.

Before the internet age, protecting student information was fairly straightforward: it was simply a matter of declaring who should be allowed to receive certain types of information. Once schools and libraries went online, all of a sudden it was an information free-for-all: Teachers, librarians, school administrators and district offices hadn't initially organized themselves to handle the new flow of information, and student data was spilling in every direction. Teachers began to have email accounts and many of them used this new communication channel to share student records directly with parents (or with whoever might happen to read the email that they sent). Meanwhile, various online student directories were created and published with abandon. A teacher might bring student records home and store them all on a home computer, or a child at a library computer might email her home address to someone without thinking twice about it. Everyone was just beginning to figure out how privacy should work as education and academic records went online.

Information in the cloud is easier to govern

Without recapping the history of how online security developed, let's just take a shortcut and jump to where the technology has brought us in 2015: cloud-based information systems. This is where Google Apps for Education comes into the story.

Google Apps for Education is an entire suite of tools used by schools around the world. You're probably already familiar with it; if not, we won't define it here because Google has already done a splendid job of describing it. Google offers deployment guides for schools to learn how to migrate their entire informational universe into this constantly expanding online suite. Teacher academies, webinars, lesson plans and user groups are all available from Google to help educators realize the incredible potential of Apps for Education.

With great potential comes great responsibility, however. What we want to tell you about is how a separate software suite can integrate with Google Apps to protect student data and ensure that all federal privacy regulations are effortlessly enforced. Here's how it works:

Full integration with Google Apps

In a marketplace collaboration with Google, SysCloud's software suite provides customized safeguards for all our clients' Google Apps data. Every bit of student-related information that travels through a school district's Google Apps for Education system can be backed up and securely protected through a single software application.

The nuts and bolts

SysCloud locks its security features into Google Drive to automatically enforce security policies that comply with FERPA and CIPA requirements, protecting PII in real-time from accidental exposure.

You're protected against data loss

When you add SysCloud backup to your school system's domain through the Google Apps Marketplace, you can back up every bit of data, including PII, on your premises as well as in the cloud. Archiving is continuously managed by SysCloud, and access to sensitive student information is strictly limited by access policies that we help you set.

Continuous scanning provides unbroken security

Every user's documents in the entire domain are scanned when any sharing is initiated. The school's administrator or admin team can set customized security controls for authorized sharing, so that no PII is ever accidentally leaked. Anytime a document is shared by more than one single individual, an alert is triggered and the sharing is controlled by the policy your district has set.

A complete audit trail is created

Compliance with federal regulations such as FERPA and CIPA must be proven to regulators through an unbroken audit trail. SysCloud's record-keeping function establishes auditable proof anytime a special information sharing request is made and granted. Furthermore, our Compliance Library lets you choose which policies you want to implement, and then customize those policies for the configuration of your particular educational system.

Enforcement is available at your fingertips

As a system administrator, you can customize enforcement policies at whatever level you prefer: PII sharing that might violate FERPA or CIPA can be automatically eliminated, or it can activate a real-time alert that allows you to manually control access.

On your SysCloud dashboard, you can see exactly what information is shared and who has access to it, no matter how many people are using your Google App. You can run reports on users at the most detailed level you want, tracking all information exchange and exposure.

As more and more educational systems recognize the unmatched benefits offered by Google Apps for Education, protecting students' personal information has been greatly simplified. SysCloud's Domain Security app streamlines compliance with federal regulations, and allows your educational system to step confidently into the new information era.

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Blog - FERPA and CIPA Compliance for Google Apps - SysCloud

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As a teacher, children's librarian or school administrator, you are faced with providing a new level of guardianship to the children whom you educate. Now that the internet is so fully integrated into the educational process, it is your responsibility to protect the personal information of your minor students from being shared (either by the school administration or by the students themselves).

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Children's Online Privacy Protection Act - Wikipedia

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The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 ( COPPA) is a United States federal law, located at 15 U.S.C. §§ 6501- 6506 ( 105-277 (text) (PDF), 112 Stat. 2681-728, enacted October 21, 1998). The act, effective April 21, 2000, applies to the online collection of personal information by persons or entities under U.S.

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General Overview of FERPA information regarding the rights of students.

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Tips | create high quality training videos

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Tips | create high quality training videos

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Using advanced Slides features | Slides | The Apps Show

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Are you looking for tips to make your presentations more engaging and captivating? Google Slides created some advanced features that will help you enhance your presentation design and flow. In this episode our hosts share with us some design tips and cover handy Slides features.

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Have you ever sat through a presentation that seemed to slog on and on? Presenters that are disorganized, dwell on trivial information and give long winded explanations that lead nowhere?

Too many presentations are afflicted by poor planning and poor visuals. The audience who come to see these presentations, pay attention for a few minutes then retreat to their mobile phones. As much as we hope that the next presentation will be different, they rarely are.

So what can we do to change the situation?

Simple - teach them some simple rules about creating effective presentations. Okay, perhaps it's not as easy as that, but certainly we can do better. So I decided to consult the world's experts and ask them for their advice. Here's what they said:
Echo Swinford, Echosvoice.com Tip: Tell the audience the point
"I'm sure I'll make a lot of people angry when I say this, but when I see a presentation that's full of unreadable graphs and tables, what goes through my head is, "Wow, this guy wants me to see how hard he worked to crunch all these numbers." We're not in third grade, and I don't need you to show me your work. What I do need is for you to show me what's relevant and tell me what your point is. If you think I'm going to want the detailed background info, then give me that in a leave-behind because I can read your 12-point type on a sheet of paper. But I can't on the screen, so don't bother.
Alan Goeman, eSlide.com Tip #1: Start with a good template Tip #2 Choose visuals wisely Tom Peters, Author of In Search of Excellence Tip #1 Remember, you are there for the median person, not the bigwig in the 1st row; how can I help the average audience member, not the outliers.
Before creating slides, make sure you are using a template that defines global properties like fonts, colors and object/chart styles. A small investment of time at the beginning to define these prevents a large loss of productivity at the end rebuilding content to look consistent.

Adding visuals to your slides makes them more impactful and more memorable, but only if they help clarify your message. Use professional quality images (not free clip-art) that relate to your most important points, and make them large enough to be easily visible. For more info see: http://eslide.com/visuals-are-key-to-presentation-success/

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20 World-Class Presentation Experts Share Their Top Tips

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Have you ever sat through a presentation that seemed to slog on and on? Presenters that are disorganized, dwell on trivial information and give long winded explanations that lead nowhere? Too many presentations are afflicted by poor planning and poor visuals. The audience who come to see these presentations, pay attention [...]

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demo videos etc

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Accessibility content and links for Google websites.

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Turning Resistant Teachers into Resilient Teachers

Jessica Bohn

Resistant teachers can have a profound effect on the school climate and culture in both positive and negative ways. In the book Leading in a Culture of Change (2007), Michael Fullan says resisters deserve respect both because they present ideas we might otherwise miss and because their influence is crucial to navigating the politics of implementation. By using situational leadership, the ability to fluidly interchange among a variety of leadership styles as the situation demands, administrators can shape teacher resistance into resilience and develop powerful partners in school initiatives. Goleman (2004) says situational leadership can mitigate the negative and enhance the positive forces influencing school climate. Effective school leaders know when to use a different leadership approach based on the behaviors and personalities of their teachers.

Types of Teacher Behaviors

I have found that resistant teachers usually fall into one of the following categories:

Those who believe administration will not help or understand them.

Those who don't have confidence in their teaching and don't know how to improve.

Those who prefer traditional methods and believe change would require too much work.

Those who lack the desire or motivation to improve.

Most reluctant teachers fall into the first three categories and can be developed into resilient teachers. The fourth category is much more rare and requires a steadfast administrator. In the next sections, I outline some ways I've worked with these different types of resistance.

Resisting the Administration

We all know that focus and expectations can change with a shift in administrators. Most educators, however, will adapt to their bosses like they adapt to their students each year. Resistant teachers differ from most teachers because they tend to remain static in the face of change. They view change as a process that happens to them, rather than with them.

An example of this comes from a teacher I used to work with. Her resistance was passive; I was a new supervisor, and she said she wanted to do what it took to make me happy. My goal was to help her improve her instruction, but her goal was to do the minimal amount to get my approval. Her attention was on me, rather than on her students, and the implied sentiment was, "Because I am not good enough for you, just tell me what you want, and I will try to please you."

Coaching this teacher involved taking the focus off of me as the leader and putting it back on students and learning. During this process, I had to build a trusting relationship with the teacher, so she trusted that I saw her value within the organization. I made progress with this teacher by coaching her to self-reflect on lesson effectiveness and learning outcomes, redirecting the focus from administrator feedback to teacher efficacy around student learning.

Resisting Out of Lack of Confidence

Consider the typical classroom situation when a student acts out because he does not understand what is being discussed. Students would rather seem disruptive than incompetent. Teachers and other adults aren't so different; resistance is a natural response when we lack knowledge or confidence but are pressured to perform.

To find out if resistance is motivated by lack of confidence or knowledge, get teachers to open up about their understanding in a one-on-one setting. For example, if teachers are resistant to a new technology initiative, individually ask concerned teachers, "What training or support would you need to teach students how to blog about their reading using an iPad?" The depth of the answer can provide clues, much in the same way that probing questions can reveal student learning gaps in the classroom. Because fear and reputation are at stake, the school administration will want to approach this problem with confidentiality and support. Possible solutions include

Professional development opportunities in the content area of need.

A peer buddy to collaboratively plan with in the content area.

A one-on-one book study between the teacher and another teacher or administrator.

Online courses in the skill needed, with follow up after completion (this allows teachers to pursue professional learning in the privacy of their own home, protecting their reputation).

The point here is to deepen the teacher's knowledge base in the area of resistance. If after becoming more informed, the teacher still resists, she will have knowledge and evidence to better frame her case.

Resisting Change

Veteran teachers are likely to resist change because they believe that traditional methods are best. These teachers are not simply trying to be difficult; they've most likely had success with their tried-and-true lessons and strategies, and so change may seem unnecessary or overwhelming. A new curricular initiative might seem like just the latest wave of change that will eventually pass. However, if you coach these teachers to understand the long-term goals of a new curriculum or initiative and discuss the possibility of the teacher piloting the new program (with lots of support from administration), you can create a powerful ally to help lead change. By having experienced teachers pilot a new program, you will get insight that may help improve whole-school implementation. At the least, even if these experienced teachers are not fans of a change, trying it first will empower them to own it and make it better.

Even teachers who support change as necessary for the good of students in the long run may feel overwhelmed by the amount of work needed to implement the change. Providing frequent feedback and unrelenting support will be crucial to helping teachers like this become robust. Rather than simply mandate the change, administrators can support the teacher with resources, professional development, and work groups to build grit and persistence. Here's how administrators can help teachers develop the grit to get through major changes:

Offer peer-led work groups after school.

Provide teacher leaders to spearhead support efforts.

Furnish detailed examples, resources, or instructions.

Pay for substitutes so that teachers can attend professional development.

Offer a weekly feedback form for teachers to communicate their challenges.

Provide regular feedback to teachers after walk-throughs.

Offer online professional development.

Model the change during staff meetings, give model lessons, provide video footage of high-quality teaching examples, and find other ways for teachers to see the change in action.

Resisting Out of Apathy

Teachers in this category need specific directives, measurable goals, and outcomes to achieve. Holding unmotivated teachers accountable will make every other teacher in your building resilient because most teachers appreciate leaders who can recognize the difference between someone who disagrees and someone who doesn't care. In most states, it can take a lot of documentation and tireless work on the part of administration to remove ineffective teachers, but the other teachers in the building will notice your tenacity in holding people accountable. This is crucial because school administrators establish the foundation for school culture through their actions.

How you tailor your approach to resistant teachers can have a powerful effect on school culture and morale. Start by assessing which type of resistance these teachers are exhibiting, and then align the supports and interventions that target their areas of need. Ultimately, by engaging resisters, you will foster a culture of resiliency that will permeate the school, from the teachers to the students.

References

Fullan, M. (2007). Leading in a culture of change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Goleman, D. (2004). Primal leadership: Learning to lead with emotional intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.

Jessica Bohn is principal at Gibsonville Elementary in Gibsonville, N.C., and a member of ASCD's 2012 class of Emerging Leaders.

ASCD Express, Vol. 9, No. 10. Copyright 2014 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.

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ASCD Express 9.10 - Turning Resistant Teachers into Resilient Teachers

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Turning Resistant Teachers into Resilient Teachers Jessica Bohn Resistant teachers can have a profound effect on the school climate and culture in both positive and negative ways. In the book Leading in a Culture of Change (2007), Michael Fullan says resisters deserve respect both because they present ideas we might otherwise miss and because their influence is crucial to navigating the politics of implementation.

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Copy of T1.U4.L1. Option 3: Design a Google Slides for Differentiation

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Copy of T1.U4.L1 Option 2: Design an Interative Google Doc Agenda

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Copy of [TRAINER COURSE] Example of an Agenda

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The world's first truly interactive training system for G Suite, designed for a modern streamlined experience and workflow.

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Vol. 70

No. 1

Abstract

What Is Feedback, Anyway?

Feedback Essentials

Progress Toward a Goal

"But There's No Time!"

Advice, evaluation, grades-none of these provide the descriptive information that students need to reach their goals. What is true feedback-and how can it improve learning?

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Abstract

What Is Feedback, Anyway?

Feedback Essentials

Progress Toward a Goal

"But There's No Time!"

Who would dispute the idea that feedback is a good thing? Both common sense and research make it clear: Formative assessment, consisting of lots of feedback and opportunities to use that feedback, enhances performance and achievement.

Yet even John Hattie (2008), whose decades of research revealed that feedback was among the most powerful influences on achievement, acknowledges that he has "struggled to understand the concept" (p. 173). And many writings on the subject don't even attempt to define the term. To improve formative assessment practices among both teachers and assessment designers, we need to look more closely at just what feedback is-and isn't.

What Is Feedback, Anyway?

The term feedback is often used to describe all kinds of comments made after the fact, including advice, praise, and evaluation. But none of these are feedback, strictly speaking.

Basically, feedback is information about how we are doing in our efforts to reach a goal. I hit a tennis ball with the goal of keeping it in the court, and I see where it lands-in or out. I tell a joke with the goal of making people laugh, and I observe the audience's reaction-they laugh loudly or barely snicker. I teach a lesson with the goal of engaging students, and I see that some students have their eyes riveted on me while others are nodding off.

Here are some other examples of feedback:

A friend tells me, "You know, when you put it that way and speak in that softer tone of voice, it makes me feel better."

A reader comments on my short story, "The first few paragraphs kept my full attention. The scene painted was vivid and interesting. But then the dialogue became hard to follow; as a reader, I was confused about who was talking, and the sequence of actions was puzzling, so I became less engaged."

A baseball coach tells me, "Each time you swung and missed, you raised your head as you swung so you didn't really have your eye on the ball. On the one you hit hard, you kept your head down and saw the ball."

Note the difference between these three examples and the first three I cited-the tennis stroke, the joke, and the student responses to teaching. In the first group, I only had to take note of the tangible effect of my actions, keeping my goals in mind. No one volunteered feedback, but there was still plenty of feedback to get and use. The second group of examples all involved the deliberate, explicit giving of feedback by other people.

Whether the feedback was in the observable effects or from other people, in every case the information received was not advice, nor was the performance evaluated. No one told me as a performer what to do differently or how "good" or "bad" my results were. (You might think that the reader of my writing was judging my work, but look at the words used again: She simply played back the effect my writing had on her as a reader.) Nor did any of the three people tell me what to do (which is what many people erroneously think feedback is-advice). Guidance would be premature; I first need to receive feedback on what I did or didn't do that would warrant such advice.

In all six cases, information was conveyed about the effects of my actions as related to a goal. The information did not include value judgments or recommendations on how to improve. (For examples of information that is often falsely viewed as feedback, see "Feedback vs. Advice" above and "Feedback vs. Evaluation and Grades" on p. 15.)

Decades of education research support the idea that by teaching less and providing more feedback, we can produce greater learning (see Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Hattie, 2008; Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). Compare the typical lecture-driven course, which often produces less-than-optimal learning, with the peer instruction model developed by Eric Mazur (2009) at Harvard. He hardly lectures at all to his 200 introductory physics students; instead, he gives them problems to think about individually and then discuss in small groups. This system, he writes, "provides frequent and continuous feedback (to both the students and the instructor) about the level of understanding of the subject being discussed" (p. 51), producing gains in both conceptual understanding of the subject and problem-solving skills. Less "teaching," more feedback equals better results.

Feedback Essentials

Whether feedback is just there to be grasped or is provided by another person, helpful feedback is goal-referenced; tangible and transparent; actionable; user-friendly (specific and personalized); timely; ongoing; and consistent.

1. Goal-Referenced

Effective feedback requires that a person has a goal, takes action to achieve the goal, and receives goal-related information about his or her actions. I told a joke-why? To make people laugh. I wrote a story to engage the reader with vivid language and believable dialogue that captures the characters' feelings. I went up to bat to get a hit. If I am not clear on my goals or if I fail to pay attention to them, I cannot get helpful feedback (nor am I likely to achieve my goals).

Information becomes feedback if, and only if, I am trying to cause something and the information tells me whether I am on track or need to change course. If some joke or aspect of my writing isn't working -a revealing, nonjudgmental phrase-I need to know.

Note that in everyday situations, goals are often implicit, although fairly obvious to everyone. I don't need to announce when telling the joke that my aim is to make you laugh. But in school, learners are often unclear about the specific goal of a task or lesson, so it is crucial to remind them about the goal and the criteria by which they should self-assess. For example, a teacher might say,

The point of this writing task is for you to make readers laugh. So, when rereading your draft or getting feedback from peers, ask, How funny is this? Where might it be funnier?

As you prepare a table poster to display the findings of your science project, remember that the aim is to interest people in your work as well as to describe the facts you discovered through your experiment. Self-assess your work against those two criteria using these rubrics. The science fair judges will do likewise.

2. Tangible and Transparent

Any useful feedback system involves not only a clear goal, but also tangible results related to the goal. People laugh, chuckle, or don't laugh at each joke; students are highly attentive, somewhat attentive, or inattentive to my teaching.

Even as little children, we learn from such tangible feedback. That's how we learn to walk; to hold a spoon; and to understand that certain words magically yield food, drink, or a change of clothes from big people. The best feedback is so tangible that anyone who has a goal can learn from it.

Alas, far too much instructional feedback is opaque, as revealed in a true story a teacher told me years ago. A student came up to her at year's end and said, "Miss Jones, you kept writing this same word on my English papers all year, and I still don't know what it means." "What's the word? " she asked. "Vag-oo," he said. (The word was vague!)

Sometimes, even when the information is tangible and transparent, the performers don't obtain it-either because they don't look for it or because they are too busy performing to focus on the effects. In sports, novice tennis players or batters often don't realize that they're taking their eyes off the ball; they often protest, in fact, when that feedback is given. (Constantly yelling "Keep your eye on the ball!" rarely works.) And we have all seen how new teachers are sometimes so busy concentrating on "teaching" that they fail to notice that few students are listening or learning.

That's why, in addition to feedback from coaches or other able observers, video or audio recordings can help us perceive things that we may not perceive as we perform; and by extension, such recordings help us learn to look for difficult-to-perceive but vital information. I recommend that all teachers videotape their own classes at least once a month. It was a transformative experience for me when I did it as a beginning teacher. Concepts that had been crystal clear to me when I was teaching seemed opaque and downright confusing on tape-captured also in the many quizzical looks of my students, which I had missed in the moment.

3. Actionable

Effective feedback is concrete, specific, and useful; it provides actionable information. Thus, "Good job!" and "You did that wrong" and B+ are not feedback at all. We can easily imagine the learners asking themselves in response to these comments, What specifically should I do more or less of next time, based on this information? No idea. They don't know what was "good" or "wrong" about what they did.

Actionable feedback must also be accepted by the performer. Many so-called feedback situations lead to arguments because the givers are not sufficiently descriptive; they jump to an inference from the data instead of simply presenting the data. For example, a supervisor may make the unfortunate but common mistake of stating that "many students were bored in class." That's a judgment, not an observation. It would have been far more useful and less debatable had the supervisor said something like, "I counted ongoing inattentive behaviors in 12 of the 25 students once the lecture was underway. The behaviors included texting under desks, passing notes, and making eye contact with other students. However, after the small-group exercise began, I saw such behavior in only one student."

Such care in offering neutral, goal-related facts is the whole point of the clinical supervision of teaching and of good coaching more generally. Effective supervisors and coaches work hard to carefully observe and comment on what they observed, based on a clear statement of goals. That's why I always ask when visiting a class, "What would you like me to look for and perhaps count?" In my experience as a teacher of teachers, I have always found such pure feedback to be accepted and welcomed. Effective coaches also know that in complex performance situations, actionable feedback about what went right is as important as feedback about what didn't work.

4. User-Friendly

Even if feedback is specific and accurate in the eyes of experts or bystanders, it is not of much value if the user cannot understand it or is overwhelmed by it. Highly technical feedback will seem odd and confusing to a novice. Describing a baseball swing to a 6-year-old in terms of torque and other physics concepts will not likely yield a better hitter. Too much feedback is also counterproductive; better to help the performer concentrate on only one or two key elements of performance than to create a buzz of information coming in from all sides.

Expert coaches uniformly avoid overloading performers with too much or too technical information. They tell the performers one important thing they noticed that, if changed, will likely yield immediate and noticeable improvement ("I was confused about who was talking in the dialogue you wrote in this paragraph"). They don't offer advice until they make sure the performer understands the importance of what they saw.

5. Timely

In most cases, the sooner I get feedback, the better. I don't want to wait for hours or days to find out whether my students were attentive and whether they learned, or which part of my written story works and which part doesn't. I say "in most cases" to allow for situations like playing a piano piece in a recital. I don't want my teacher or the audience barking out feedback as I perform. That's why it is more precise to say that good feedback is "timely" rather than "immediate."

A great problem in education, however, is untimely feedback. Vital feedback on key performances often comes days, weeks, or even months after the performance-think of writing and handing in papers or getting back results on standardized tests. As educators, we should work overtime to figure out ways to ensure that students get more timely feedback and opportunities to use it while the attempt and effects are still fresh in their minds.

Before you say that this is impossible, remember that feedback does not need to come only from the teacher, or even from people at all. Technology is one powerful tool-part of the power of computer-assisted learning is unlimited, timely feedback and opportunities to use it. Peer review is another strategy for managing the load to ensure lots of timely feedback; it's essential, however, to train students to do small-group peer review to high standards, without immature criticisms or unhelpful praise.

6. Ongoing

Adjusting our performance depends on not only receiving feedback but also having opportunities to use it. What makes any assessment in education formative is not merely that it precedes summative assessments, but that the performer has opportunities, if results are less than optimal, to reshape the performance to better achieve the goal. In summative assessment, the feedback comes too late; the performance is over.

Thus, the more feedback I can receive in real time, the better my ultimate performance will be. This is how all highly successful computer games work. If you play Angry Birds, Halo, Guitar Hero, or Tetris, you know that the key to substantial improvement is that the feedback is both timely and ongoing. When you fail, you can immediately start over-sometimes even right where you left off-to get another opportunity to receive and learn from the feedback. (This powerful feedback loop is also user-friendly. Games are built to reflect and adapt to our changing need, pace, and ability to process information.)

It is telling, too, that performers are often judged on their ability to adjust in light of feedback. The ability to quickly adapt one's performance is a mark of all great achievers and problem solvers in a wide array of fields. Or, as many little league coaches say, "The problem is not making errors; you will all miss many balls in the field, and that's part of learning. The problem is when you don't learn from the errors."

7. Consistent

To be useful, feedback must be consistent. Clearly, performers can only adjust their performance successfully if the information fed back to them is stable, accurate, and trustworthy. In education, that means teachers have to be on the same page about what high-quality work is. Teachers need to look at student work together, becoming more consistent over time and formalizing their judgments in highly descriptive rubrics supported by anchor products and performances. By extension, if we want student-to-student feedback to be more helpful, students have to be trained to be consistent the same way we train teachers, using the same exemplars and rubrics.

Progress Toward a Goal

In light of these key characteristics of helpful feedback, how can schools most effectively use feedback as part of a system of formative assessment? The key is to gear feedback to long-term goals.

Let's look at how this works in sports. My daughter runs the mile in track. At the end of each lap in races and practice races, the coaches yell out split times (the times for each lap) and bits of feedback ("You're not swinging your arms!" "You're on pace for 5:15"), followed by advice ("Pick it up-you need to take two seconds off this next lap to get in under 5:10!").

My daughter and her teammates are getting feedback (and advice) about how they are performing now compared with their final desired time. My daughter's goal is to run a 5:00 mile. She has already run 5:09. Her coach is telling her that at the pace she just ran in the first lap, she is unlikely even to meet her best time so far this season, never mind her long-term goal. Then, he tells her something descriptive about her current performance (she's not swinging her arms) and gives her a brief piece of concrete advice (take two seconds off the next lap) to make achievement of the goal more likely.

The ability to improve one's result depends on the ability to adjust one's pace in light of ongoing feedback that measures performance against a concrete, long-term goal. But this isn't what most school district "pacing guides" and grades on "formative" tests tell you. They yield a grade against recent objectives taught, not useful feedback against the final performance standards. Instead of informing teachers and students at an interim date whether they are on track to achieve a desired level of student performance by the end of the school year, the guide and the test grade just provide a schedule for the teacher to follow in delivering content and a grade on that content. It's as if at the end of the first lap of the mile race, My daughter's coach simply yelled out, " B+ on that lap!"

The advice for how to change this sad situation should be clear: Score student work in the fall and winter against spring standards, use more pre-and post-assessments to measure progress toward these standards, and do the item analysis to note what each student needs to work on for better future performance.

"But There's No Time!"

Although the universal teacher lament that there's no time for such feedback is understandable, remember that "no time to give and use feedback" actually means "no time to cause learning." As we have seen, research shows that less teaching plus more feedback is the key to achieving greater learning. And there are numerous ways-through technology, peers, and other teachers-that students can get the feedback they need.

So try it out. Less teaching, more feedback. Less feedback that comes only from you, and more tangible feedback designed into the performance itself. And, of course, send me some feedback on this article at gwiggins@authenticeducation.org.

Feedback vs. Advice

› You need more examples in your report.

› You might want to use a lighter baseball bat.

› You should have included some Essential Questions in your unit plan.

These three statements are not feedback; they're advice. Such advice out of the blue seems at best tangential and at worst unhelpful and annoying. Unless it is preceded by descriptive feedback, the natural response of the performer is to wonder, "Why are you suggesting this?"

As coaches, teachers, and parents, we too often jump right to advice without first ensuring that the learner has sought, grasped, and tentatively accepted the feedback on which the advice is based. By doing so, we often unwittingly end up unnerving learners. Students become increasingly insecure about their own judgment and dependent on the advice of experts-and therefore in a panic about what to do when varied advice comes from different people or no advice is available at all.

If your ratio of advice to feedback is too high, try asking the learner, "Given the feedback, do you have some ideas about how to improve?" This approach will build greater autonomy and confidence over the long haul. Once they are no longer rank novices, performers can often self-advise if asked to.

Feedback vs. Evaluation and Grades

› This is a weak paper.

› You got a C on your presentation.

› I'm so pleased by your poster!

These comments make a value judgment. They rate, evaluate, praise, or criticize what was done. There is little or no feedback here-no actionable information about what occurred. As performers, we only know that someone else placed a high or low value on what we did.

How might we recast these comments to be useful feedback? Tip: Always add a mental colon after each statement of value. For example,

"Good work: Your use of words was more precise in this paper than in the last one, and I saw the scenes clearly in my mind's eye."

"This is a weak paper: Almost from the first sentence, I was confused as to your initial thesis and the evidence you provide for it. In the second paragraph you propose a different thesis, and in the third paragraph you don't offer evidence, just beliefs."

You'll soon find that you can drop the evaluative language; it serves no useful function.

The most ubiquitous form of evaluation, grading, is so much a part of the school landscape that we easily overlook its utter uselessness as actionable feedback. Grades are here to stay, no doubt-but that doesn't mean we should rely on them as a major source of feedback.

References

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Hattie, J. (2008). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York: Routledge.

Mazur, E. (2009, January 2). Farewell, lecture? Science, 323, 50-51.

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