Canons High School GangA*star INSET day – Thursday 3rd
October 2013
Self- and peer-evaluation session
One of my very talented
colleagues from the CHS English department and I, a Modern Languages teacher and
Pedagogy Leader (@tommegit), organised and ran a workshop for staff at CHS as part of the
INSET day which was focused upon challenge and stretch (with the ultimate aim
of increasing the number of students achieving A/A* grades), and our particular focus was on self-
and peer-evaluation. It was a wonderful opportunity to hear different staff
members’ perspectives on these different
forms of evaluation, coming from a wide range of subject areas and distinct
classroom experiences; so wonderful in fact, that it has inspired me to reflect
on it now and share it through the Canons Broadside blog!
After an excellent introduction
to the aims and desired outcomes of the day’s INSET by one of our
high-achieving Year 13 students, who already has an impressive set of exam
results and qualifications under his belt, staff went off in groups to take
part in two themed workshops that they had chosen in advance. Each workshop focused
on a particular area of pedagogy that could be viewed as an integral part of
helping students aspire to achieve to the highest standard. The hope was that
these sessions would get us to delve deeper into the thought process of what it
is we are doing as pedagogues to help our students to be the best they can be;
to push them beyond what is expected of them by others, beyond what their
minimum target grade says they ‘should’ be getting. We want to inspire our
students to aim for the top and to strive to be better than they are expected
to be.
Elsewhere around the school,
thought-provoking workshops were taking place, each focusing on different
aspects of teaching and learning that we felt played an important part in
meeting the needs of our high attaining students. The themes of the workshops
covered a good mix of core teaching
techniques, including scaffolding, questioning, group learning, investigation
and enquiry, the use of SOLO taxonomy and the ‘Flipped Classroom’. Actually,
looking back on the range of sessions that we had running during this INSET
day, I’m very jealous that I couldn’t go around to see all of them! But in
actual fact, I was extremely lucky myself to be part of some of the most
stimulating conversations I’ve ever had about teaching and learning, and
sharing our thoughts on how we go about supporting the students we teach to be
successful evaluators in their own learning.
To get the ball rolling, staff in
our workshop wrote down on their mini-whiteboards (an old favourite of mine!)
one thing that they found particularly useful when receiving feedback from
another member of staff, more than likely to be a line manager, after a lesson
observation, for example. That could have been a specific comment that they had
received in the past, or the way in which the feedback was given. Some staff
prefer it when they are given practical tips and examples of good practice that
will help them move forward. Others prefer more of a coaching technique,
whereby they are encouraged to formulate their own ways forward after a
reflective discussion with their observer.
What all staff seemed to agree
on, however, was that in order to get the most out of an appraisal situation,
there needs to be dialogue, discussion, two-way communication, questions, more
questions, and fundamentally, agreement between both parties. Everyone is
different, and individual preferences will vary, but it is good to identify
some common ground when investigating what makes for productive evaluation. And
by and large, teachers know what is expected of them by their students, by
their colleagues, by their line managers, by published teaching standards, and
by other external bodies (not mentioning any names!). But can the same be said
for the children we teach?
Discussion moved on to
identifying the strengths and limitations of teacher-, peer- and
self-evaluation. In groups of three or four, staff gave well-balanced
interpretations of when and how each should be incorporated into our lessons.
The groups who concentrated on teacher-evaluation
identified the key advantage is that we, the teachers, are the subject
specialists, the experts, meaning that we are suitably equipped with the appropriate
knowledge to provide relevant, targeted feedback and feed-forward to our
learners, guiding them in the right direction. Furthermore, when we provide the
feedback, it is relatively quick, and it provides us with an opportunity to
check progress, which then goes towards planning our future lessons. However,
it came across very clearly from our staff that this was perhaps not the most
effective form of evaluation in terms of the students really learning
from feedback comments.
So how might peer-evaluation
be better? Staff felt that it is beneficial to allow students to get together
and discuss want is going well and what can be improved. A striking resemblance
to what staff said made for effective evaluation in their own professional
development. The key difference here, though, is that perhaps our students don’t
know how
to give high quality feedback on their peers’ work. Often, students can be
overly generous or particularly stingy when marking other people’s work, and
many are influenced by complex social relationships that naturally occur within
every classroom setting. This went on to raise the question, ‘How important is
it to model peer feedback’?
Finally, as far as self-evaluation
is concerned, similar points arose from discussion. Allowing students to
evaluate their own progress can lead to better literacy and articulation, it
can help students to review their efforts, and improve their self-esteem. But
all of this is reliant on the clarity and purposefulness of the success
criteria with which they are using to evaluate themselves and/or their peers.
It is evident that students need to be trained in giving constructive feedback
that will help themselves and others to move forward in their thinking, in an
effort to move them away from giving superficial comments such as ‘Your
handwriting is very neat’, or ‘You have written a lot. Well done’!
Many teachers have noticed that
students tend to focus more on what they have managed to get right or do well
in their work, and tend to ignore what it is that they have got wrong, or have
neglected to include in their work. Whilst it is obviously important to
acknowledge on what has been done effectively and praise the positive elements,
it is equally important, indeed essential, to require our students to explore what
can be done to raise the standard of work towards fulfilling the top bands of
success criteria, in order to challenge our students and provide them with the
opportunity to be as successful as they possibly can be.
So how can we train our students
to close the gap between their original
piece of work (first draft) and a higher quality piece of work after acting
upon feedback (final draft)? At this point, I’d like to recommend reading two
excellent blog posts that discuss these themes further: the first posted by Tom
Sherrington, Making
feedback count: “Close the gap”; the second posted by Harry Fletcher Wood, Closing
the gap marking – give them a read, they’re very insightful!
As our group discussions
developed, teachers were full of wonderful ideas of how to get students to
provide, as well as act upon, constructive feedback for improving their work.
Ideas included role-modelling constructive feedback dialogue, sharing model
answers with a clear feedback commentary, sharing key success criteria with
students, allowing them to be the examiners by providing students with mark
schemes, and training students as experts or ‘lead learners’ in particular
areas of work, based on their own strengths.
One colleague went into more
detail about using expert groups of students and ‘lead learners’. Imagine setting
up the classroom so that, on different groups of desks, you have different
groups of expert students focussing on one particular area of evaluation (e.g.
checking correct use of subject-specific terminology, checking the structure of
paragraphs, checking grammar and punctuation, checking that relevant sources
have been used to back up an argument, etc.). Pieces of work can then rotate
around the different groups of experts, and on each rotation, they add Post-it
® notes with a targeted piece of feedback from their particular area of
expertise to help the recipient improve their work on re-draft. This is an idea
that I am keen to develop in my own MFL classroom, particularly with my GCSE
classes when, during Stage 2 of their Writing and Speaking Controlled
Assessments, the teacher is no longer permitted to provide students with
support.
An issue that we discussed
surrounding these ideas was that, potentially, providing students with mark
schemes and success criteria can back-fire owing to the formal and often
ambiguous language used in these sorts of documents. If, for example, one of
the bands in a mark scheme explains how to award a certain number of marks for
“an appropriate
response”, well, what on earth does appropriate mean or look like?! It
can sometimes be a challenge for teachers to consistently and accurately
interpret some mark schemes, so I truly feel for our students on that front. It
simply highlights the importance of making these kinds of documents accessible
to our learners by adapting the language in mark schemes and success criteria so
that it is more student-friendly and less alien.
We felt that it was essential to
ensure that success criteria is well built up for students, allowing for clear
progression and encouraging more complex compositions. It needs to be framed
within a real context, in order to bring a piece of work to life and for it to
carry more meaning for the students. They need to be able to interact and
engage with the criteria rather than feel threatened by it. We discussed how
adding SOLO Taxonomy symbols (pre-structural, uni-structural, multi-structural,
relational, extended abstract) to each band of the success criteria could help
students to meet this end. We also felt that we need to let our students practise
marking on their own, then discussing the thought process behind their marking
with a partner or small group, encouraging them to find evidence from the piece
of work to support their decisions, before sharing it with the rest of the
class (think, pair, square, share). Although this can be a daunting experience for
students the first few times they try this, the group believed that having open
forum discussions in this way will help raise their confidence and make them
feel more familiar with and comfortable using marking criteria.
As the workshop was reaching its
conclusion, I asked the group to write down a reflective comment or further
question to consider on their mini-whiteboards as a way of consolidating what
had been discussed around using different evaluation strategies to stretch and
challenge our students, and I’d like to round off this blog post by sharing
some of their extremely high quality reflections:
·
‘If students are not trained properly how to
peer-assess then this may affect the quality of the feedback and feed-forward’;
·
‘It is important that time is dedicated to
training students to peer-evaluate effectively. This should start at Key Stage
3’;
·
‘Self-evaluation should be built in Key Stage 3
so that they can be trained for Key Stage 4. This will help push the A/A*
students to think about their work’;
·
‘Is giving model answers to students a good
idea? Does it challenge them or does it help to spoon feed? I am undecided’;
·
‘Asking us to consider the pros and cons of
self-, peer- and teacher-evaluation made me realise how essential the first two
are in ensuring students really understand how to improve – they involve
thinking and doing, rather than receiving ‘wisdom’ from the teacher – active
rather than passive learning’;
·
‘Need to make criteria student-friendly. Close
the gap. Key words in a good answer. Illustrate the criteria’;
·
‘Allowing more time to share and reflect on the
feedback when it’s been given’;
·
‘Evaluation is effective in increasing the
number of A/A* grades – the issue is that we need to take a variety of approaches to evaluation.
Sometimes self, then peer, and of course teacher. Peer-evaluation and use of
the micro-teacher very effective!!’;
·
‘Making time at the start of the lesson to
respond to marked work’;
·
‘How do we make grade criteria easier to access
for our students without removing challenge?’;
·
‘Ensure students act upon feedback by regularly
revisiting and reviewing their progress. Small achievable targets leading to
incremental gains for all students’.
This variety of reflection reminds
me of the challenges that face our school, or any school for that
matter, in ensuring that we, as practitioners, have the time and space to
digest this food-for-thought and consider what best suits us as individuals in
our own unique teaching situations, whilst at the same being provided with the
supportive frameworks to allow us to learn from, and with, each other.
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