the importance of feedback

[ginlindzey]

I really want to write more about this later but just have to get this down while it is fresh in my head.

As I was walking to my classroom this Saturday morning to grade the last portfolios I hope to ever have to grade BECAUSE I NO LONGER WILL TEACH ENGLISH!, I was thinking it would be nice to instead be grading some Latin stuff.  I have been horrible at grading homework this year, and it makes me think about the amount of feedback students in Latin have NOT gotten from me.  Then as I approached my classroom door, having noticed no one else was around, I remembered that some of the other English teachers only just glance through the portfolios to see that the students have everything.

I don't.  I read them.  I look at the reflections for each item: Most Important, Most Satisfying, Least Satisfying, Biography of a Work, Negotiated Pick, Free Pick.    

So right now, I'm reading a reflection from a relatively good English student, a young man, who has written that what was important on this project was the amount of feedback the teacher gave for every little thing, not the grade.  It said that no other teacher had ever given him feedback like that, and it was important to him, showing him how to truly improve for the next time.  

To my surprise, it was of an essay he had written for me.  *I* was the one who had given all of the feedback.  

But what gets me is HOW can I be the only one who has ever done this?  What have his previous English teachers done, the ones who are better trained to teach English, who have more experience, whose jobs ALWAYS hang in the balance because of standardized test scores???

No matter.  I've got to get back to grading because I don't want to be here all day.  I have Latin tests to write.  God knows I have A LOT to do for Latin.  

I just wanted to say that if you have ever wondered whether it was a waste of time to write comments on papers, it's not.  There WILL BE that ONE student who will say, THANKS for taking the time.    There will be that one student who will make you feel like perhaps you haven't done such a bad job....

***

I'm home now, and I never finished grading portfolios because the family wanted to go see Indiana Jones.  I'll just go back out to school tomorrow; I have a LOT I can be doing anyway; I'm panicking about so many things it will be good to go back out there.  And there are only 3 portfolios left to grade.

I was thinking about the things I do grade for Latin that I do give feedback on--quizzes and tests.  It seems to take me forever to grade quizzes these days (because I finally have a lot of students???) and tests, esp tests.  The tests are part multiple choice via scantron, so that shouldn't be a problem.  But the first part is reading comp/short answers and then this year I've added a section of translation on the test of a seen passage.  

But even that's not what takes me so long, I don't think.  I take time to see WHAT the student missed and if the student wrote on his/her test (which I GREATLY encourage), if figure out WHY they missed it--what they misunderstood, etc.

The other day I handed tests back to the Latin 1's, and I remember I had written a long note on the front of one girl's test.  She's not a great student but she's not bottom of the barrel either.  And in all honesty, I do not remember what I wrote.  I don't get enough sleep and I am keenly aware that it has really impacted my memory for things.  I do remember it was some form of encouragement, and that I was glad she had shown her work because I could tell she got PART of it (relative clauses) but just didn't get the gender part.  Well, whatever I wrote, I've never seen her so happy and she thanked me profusely.  I am the cool teacher in her eyes...

I am the cool teacher with a lot of kids, not because I'm fun, but because they know I try to help them, that I want them to succeed, that I'll even help them on tests (just pointing them in the right direction, nothing major) to keep them on track.  I have one student who is slow to get things.  He's not stupid, he's just slow, and he lacks confidence.  I've been giving him pep talks and the last vocab quiz he got--with a bit of extra credit--a 100.  A tremendous score for him.

And I guess I do a bit of the prodigal son with my students--that is, when a student who has bombed a lot of quizzes and such pulls off an A, I tell the whole class when I'm handing it back.  Some will jokingly say I'm being insulting, but they understand what I'm doing.  Most of them know what it's like to struggle and how important it is that someone recognizes that you ARE making an effort.

On another of the portfolios today, one of the students, a girl whose a rodeo barrel racer (and apparently really good at it), was complaining in two of her reflections on essays that didn't earn a great grade that not everyone can write and that the teacher (me!) just didn't understand.  I replied on the rubric sheet that I actually did understand, but it was still my job to try to get her to write.  AND that I thought that if I had asked her to write about barrel racing that she would have been able to supply the kind of details that her writing lacked when writing about literature.  I'm interested to see how she replies.

The real problem is that it isn't easy to give good feedback all of the time.  There just aren't enough hours in the day.  There just aren't.  And it is TRULY FRUSTRATING.  But there are times you just have to find the time somehow.  It's important to them, and to you.  

And another thing that I think is truly critical in order to be a good teacher is empathy--true empathy.  If you've never struggled to learn anything but it's always come easy to you, you will have a harder time understanding why some students don't learn.  This is another reason why I encourage and bribe students to show their work on tests--how else will I really know whether they get something?  HOW?

ANYWAY.  Enough on this.  Time to fold some laundry and later to gather some electronic files to use on the midterm I'm revising for Latin 1.  I have to write the Latin 2 midterm from scratch (and just WHY oh WHY haven't I begun?????)   

Comments

Feedback

[magister13.livejournal.com]

So true. Students thrive on personal interest in what and how they're doing in your class. I always try to write something on their translations to show them where they're really exceeding or where they seem to be going off the track. Often it's the first thing they look for. I'd like to do more, but like you mention time too often becomes a factor. I can also remember what those written comments meant to me as a student in vast contrast to those teachers who corrected using some kind of lettered or numbered code, or worse yet teachers who merely marked it wrong or assigned points with no explanation at all.

I would be interested in knowing more about what you have the kids write on their exams and how you take that into consideration.

Re: Feedback

[ginlindzey.livejournal.com]

I teach students, via warm-ups and such, to circle tense indicators and endings before translating verbs, for instance. So on a test, when I'm asking grammar questions after a sight passage, and the student has to identify the tense of a verb, I expect to see BA circled and maybe even a 3-legged IMPERFECT sheep in the margin next to a correctly chosen answer. Sometimes students need to take those steps and I teach them that THAT'S OK, that the smart kids are naturally doing it and everyone else can do it and get the right answer too. That's just one example.

I teach them metaphrasing during warm-ups, so that when they meet an accusative or a dative first in a sentence, they don't automatically think subject. I will sometimes see things like "someone verbed the slave" for servum starting a sentence OR the kid will write ACC over servum to remind themselves not to think subject.

I'll teach them sentence patterns to look for so when doing relative clauses they will see either NOM + ACC + Verb, ACC + NOM + Verb, or Nom + EST + VERB. ANd if they have to pick the correct relative pronoun for that clause, they can see what pattern is there. AND I teach them to circle the antecedent and write the CNG over it.

With one girl, I could tell from what she wrote that she understood the sentence patterns but she forgot about gender, so I knew what to emphasize when I was reviewing.

Things like that. I give points for mnemonic devices scribbled anywhere, for noun endings, verb endings, whatever. Yeah, occasionally a kid will write whatever he/she knows because they realize they are bombing the test. The few points never helps their grade enough if that's the case. And of course the A students don't really need the extra credit. But there are the kids in the middle, the kids who might not sign up for Latin three if I didn't encourage them and if they didn't find something encouraging, and those are the students this helps the most. They hover around C's and B's, and sometimes wonder if their effort is worthwhile. I show them that it is and give them the boost they need to keep working at it.