Activating Students as Learning Resources for One Another.  From the 2 case studies and videos, they explicated how:
1.  how student self-assessment helps teachers filter the rich data that arise in class discussion and activity so that professional judgments can be made about the next steps in learning;
2. Peer and self-assessment play a vital role in students becoming familiar with the way that work is judged.

The purpose of feedback is to advance students’ learning. Other than improving students’ learning, the process of giving and receiving feedback is also a good opportunity for teachers to impart and for students to cultivate the Growth Mindset and build self-efficacy. 

With the belief that all students are learning at their own pace, feedback given should avoid comparison with other students and association with “punishments” to build a positive attitude and disposition towards receiving feedback. 

 Something new that I have learnt

1. To help students to develop greater understanding and appreciation of the feedback given, it is worthwhile to invest time to understand students’ beliefs in feedback giving and co-construct expectations and routines of feedback practices with them. In so doing, it helps to cultivate positive classroom culture, enhance teacher-student relationship and build safe environment for learning.

2. Strategies on reframing students’ perspective of feedback by applying the 5R framework. 

 Challenges and how to overcome

Challenge 1: To be a skillful and effective teacher in identifying and applying the suitable type of feedback (i.e. immediate vs delayed, guided vs open, individual-level vs class-level, task vs process etc.) by accurately assessing my students’ learner profile and readiness. 

Challenge 2: How to balance specific and generic feedback such that the feedback is constructive for students while remain transferable across topics / tasks. 

I can practise (and role-model) Growth Mindset by taking “baby steps” and equipping myself with the knowledge of the types / level of effective feedback, and intentionally practise a few of them to develop my feedback literacy. 

1. The dynamics of my class and their learning abilities (where they are at - readiness) have to be considered. Then, plan what and how to teach them about receiving feedback and how to act on it. Learners must become familiar with feedback over a few sessions before they can comprehend its intent. To help students understand "how" to react, "what" to respond to, and "where" to go next, the teacher would need to demonstrate.

2. As there are many types of feedback that could help the learners (e.g. corrective, facilitative, task-level, process-level, etc), each has its own strength. The teacher will need to consider the lesson package’s learning intention to see which feedback best suits the learner’s learning and helps them to move forward (feed-forward).

3. Personal take, the teacher must also be sensitive to individual learners’ needs when facilitating the class. Setting a safe environment for learning is essential for everyone in the classroom, including the teacher (positive environment and positive TSR). Setting boundaries - being respectful of self and others, setting individual expectations – being responsible, and having ownership of learning, and classroom routines.

Allowing co-construction together as a class to tackle and overcome ANTs. Guiding the learners on how to reframe their thoughts using 5Rs frameworks. 

 

Inversely, feedback that is unclear can also confuse and discourage learners. It can also negate all the hard work that the teacher has put in to craft the task, assess and provide the feedback. As such, adopting effective feedback practices is essential tool that a good teacher must have.

 

2.     What is something new that I have learnt from this MLU?

In order to be able to adopt effective feedback practices, I will have to be able to help my students’ to manage their social-emotional response to my feedback. I think helping them to manage  their ANTs and reframing their responses to the feedback is something I need to address in class. It also got me thinking about the positive culture that I must create in class that allows them to bring up their social-emotional responses within the comforts of their classroom. I also question the amount thought I use in the choice of words that I use to formulate the feedback.

 

I would also need to manage the cognitive response students’ will have on feedback. Helping students understand the purpose of the different types of feedbacks and finding out what are their preference would go a long way towards understanding which works best for which profile of students. It can also help me decide which feedback serves to facilitate what I would like the students to eventually achieve at the end of lesson.

 

3.     What are some challenges in applying what I have learnt in this MLU, and how can I overcome them?

I think one of the biggest challenges would be the lack of data. The MLU suggests we find out about the kind of feedback our students prefer and to have a discussion on how students perceive feedback. I think this should be practice done at the start of the year if possible, something we should now include as part of our routine “Tell-me-about-you” questionnaire that we use during orientation. This would give ample time for teachers to have cater effective feedback to their students eventually.

 

Another challenge that could possible hamper this effective practices is our expertise in handling the variety of feedback preferences and the media in which it is presented. It can be overwhelming, especially for someone who is only familiar with written feedback to suddenly excel at giving effective verbal feedback. As such, I think to be strategic, I would probably focus on harnessing a few types of feedbacks at first before expanding my repertoire. 

2)    To balance generic and specific feedback to students, I might consider giving real-life or easy-to-understand examples to facilitate better comprehension of the feedback provided.

3)    Some of the new things I have learnt is that it is important to create a non-threatening and more conducive environment when feedback is going to be given. It is also good to establish good rapport and understanding of the students’ learning styles and not compare them with other students when providing feedback. 

- Type in your responses to the questions posed or you respond to at least one of your peers' posts. Your response can be in the form of encouragement, a comment, or a question.
- Upload evidence of students' learning in the form of artefacts. They can be in the form of videos, and/or pictures. I have provided an example of a lesson of how I gathered evidence of student learning (ongoing assessments) in an EL lesson for your reference.

Questions:

A. Why must TOS be analysed alongside students' assessment scores/evidence and learning outcomes? What is the intent of doing this?

B. Why is looking at the aggregated score (for example, 50% of the students passed this assessment item) not comprehensive enough [concept of reliability- are you using the appropriate assessment tools? and validity- is there more than one data source(s)] for you to understand students' learning gaps?

C. What other ways can you gather evidence of students' learning progress? Provide examples in your classroom, specific to your teaching subject(s). 

 

These are the two  key FA strategies and DI principles that guided my lesson enactment: On-going assessments leveraging on peers as learning resources for one another (building a community of learners) with appropriate degree of support and challenge. I will upload more along the way to demonstrate the on-going tasks and discussions that were enacted in response to students' work. Cheers!

B.      Looking at aggregated scores is not enough as it cannot inform us about specific nature of students’ learning gap. Perhaps students did not respond as expected as the assessment questions could be crafted poorly.

C.       Test/assessment such as spelling, listening comprehension, reading assessment

In order for students to not develop Automatic Negative Thoughts when receiving feedback, students need to be able to identify, catch and avoid their ANTs. They also can use the 5R Framework to reframe their perspective. I feel that this requires deliberate action from the teacher, especially for younger students. We recently talked about Growth Mindset in class and this is in line with getting students to reframe their ANTs and understand that their teacher is trying to help them improve and not point out their flaws. Since I teach younger students (P3s), I am quite intentional about reminding them that it is alright to make mistakes and we are all learning together as a class. When I get students to come up to the board to solve a problem or when I show students’ work on the visualiser, I also emphasise that the goal is for everyone to learn together and not to embarrass anyone if they make mistakes. Hopefully, this will encourage students to see feedback in a more positive light.