Keynotes and Feedback

My students have been hard at work over the last few weeks on a big project around the Harlem Renaissance. One area I have been trying to grow in as a teacher is to have student voices and input in both the work they do, the expected quality, and now into the realm of feedback once the work is underway. So often as teachers we want to give meaningful feedback to all of our students on each piece of work, and for me with over 90 students this can be a daunting task. I also wonder if it's being read and how its being used if I already have given the almighty grade in the book. So I decided to approach this task of giving students feedback by including them in the process.

Another positive aspect technology has given is easier sharing of student work. Often seeing other peoples' work allows us to grow in our own work and imagination. I decided to bring both sharing and feedback to students in my classes as they prepare to share their work with others in the school later in the week.

We began the conversation with what is feedback, what type of feedback is helpful, and what should a person do when they get feedback? We came up with some shared language for feedback so it was phrased respectfully and then we hit the ground running. I was so proud of the feedback that they gave to each other as it was both respectful and constructive. It was some of the exact feedback I would have given to students, and yet some of it was something I had not considered or thought of to give. We also talked about how the person could chose or ignore feedback as he or she saw fit. The student may want to make the changes to capitalization, but may like the way the slide looks without a picture even though someone may have suggested to add one to the slide.

The student getting the feedback now had over ten comments from peers to consider when taking a second look at their presentation, not only feedback but a digital record to go back and re-read after present. It also pushed the rest of the class into the evaluation stage of thinking, all while having access to work of a peer to get ideas to take back to their own presentation, again with a digital record to reference.

A few takeaways from this activity for me are that in days when engagement can a challenge, I had most of my class engaged at a critical thinking stage, I had students sharing ideas, getting feedback on work, and ideas were being shared and saved through the use of ipads.

Here are some samples of the work.

Keynote Feedback from Autumn Laidler on Vimeo.