MWSubstack 022: Feedback. Rubrics.
Which feedback strategies most help students meet academic expectations? And how can teachers strengthen and clarify their rubrics?
Welcome to MiddleWeb Substack. It’s a twice-monthly, two-topic, five-minute read for middle grades educators, featuring a selection of MiddleWeb’s most popular and influential articles, a book review, and a noteworthy 4-8 resource or project we’ve spotted. That’s it!
►STUDENT FEEDBACK
Don’t ask students to hit invisible targets.
Feedback is one of those education words that's difficult to nail down. Many discussions about feedback, especially in the middle grades, tend to focus on its emotional impact on students, the balancing of positive and negative, the words we choose as we correct and evaluate.
Instructional specialist Miriam Plotinsky points teachers down a somewhat different path. Plotinsky defines the goal of feedback as "making success visible to students." In her MiddleWeb article Structure Feedback to Affirm Student Identity she writes:
"(T)he misunderstandings that arise from teacher-to-student feedback are the result of flawed assumptions about how well students comprehend what is expected of them.... For feedback to be meaningful, it has to be objective and clearly connected to criteria for success that are written in student-friendly terms."
Plotinsky offers an example:
Suppose I want a friend to pick up an apple for me from the grocery store. I probably have a list of criteria that define the apple I want, like a crispy interior and a certain ratio of sweetness to tartness. If I share these attributes with my friend...she is more likely to buy an apple that I enjoy.
However, if I let her go to the store and bring back whatever she thinks is appropriate, it is hardly fair for me to get upset when she brings me an apple that I deem unworthy. After all, I never gave her useful information about what I wanted.
To extend this analogy to the classroom, teachers must share specific expectations for each assignment with students early and often. If not, we are asking them to hit invisible targets, which is unfair.
When teachers make a habit of providing criteria for success with each assignment and responding to student work by sharing how the student met the listed criteria and what they still need to do, they provide objective feedback.
By giving students a criteria-for-success checklist to work from that is easy to understand, Plotinsky says, teachers can avoid a "feedback hole" where the process only goes one way, students do not understand how to improve, and they are more likely to disengage.
Other feedback insights:
The Eight Essentials of Good Student Feedback (Barbara Blackburn)
What Kind of Feedback Best Motivates Students? (Larry Ferlazzo)
Give Kids Focused, Fast and Effective Feedback (Curtis Chandler)
Regie Routman “believes that we are most fully ourselves when ‘teaching, learning, and living are interwoven and seamlessly integrated.’ To show us this full self, she shares stories that might help us navigate our own worlds.“ – Read Sarah Cooper’s review of The Heart-Centered Teacher.
►RUBRICS
Students need a clear understanding of what you expect.
Do you remember the first time you heard about rubrics? For us, it was way back in 1997 when a mindful professor named Heidi Andrade (whose credentials include Harvard's famous Project Zero) described the most effective ways to create and teach with them.
Andrade shared her insights in a very early article at our original MiddleWeb site. We saved it here. What's most interesting about this artifact from the dawn of the rubrics movement is how accurately she identifies the mistakes we should anticipate when creating and using them. Andrade closed her still-relevant article this way:
However you use rubrics, the idea is to support and to evaluate student learning. Students, as well as teachers, should respond to the use of rubrics by thinking, "Yes, this is what I need!"
Flashing forward to the 2020s, MiddleWeb features several popular articles about rubrics, including teacher leader Stephanie Farley's Creating Rubrics That Foster Student Growth and Single-Point Rubrics Are Efficient and Impactful. Farley writes:
The key concept in rubric writing is clarifying its purpose. As a younger teacher, I thought of the rubric as a tool for me to grade a paper. After some professional development and deep reading about competency-based learning, I reframed the rubric’s purpose as a tool to provide feedback to the student about their progress toward mastery of a learning target.
This shift changed everything! By centering student growth, I was able to provide specific feedback that my students could understand and easily implement. It was a miracle.
Other excellent MiddleWeb articles about rubrics include Tan Huynh's post on co-creating a rubric to serve multilingual learners and Megan Kelly's Rubrics: Five Go-To Ways to Engage Students.
►ELSEWHERE
Avoiding subjective, kid-unfriendly rubric language.
MiddleWeb contributor Dr. Karin Hess's action-oriented research articles show up in our Top 10 most-read just about every day of the year. Here's one Karin wrote for Edutopia that we wish we'd published! It's 6 Key Questions to Build Better Rubrics, subtitled "A framework for creating assessment tools that clearly communicate assignment expectations and encourage high-quality work." Short and pithy.
►OUR BOOK REVIEW
Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams and Organizations. By Mary C. Murphy.
We all deserve to work towards creating a culture of growth in our schools, and reading Mary C. Murphy’s Cultures of Growth on the science of mindset is a wonderful place to start, writes instructional coach Brad Waguespack. The book applies Dweck’s findings about individuals to organizations and groups. Read the complete review.
►REVIEW FOR US!
Browse our complete list of free professional books available for review.
►NEXT TIME
A complete issue dedicated to reluctant readers. We'll share summaries of our eight most-read articles.