Providing Feedback - Last Blog

Providing feedback is so essential in keeping students aware of their progress. I know that even as a gradudate student, I value it tremendously! I like to know what I am doing right and what I need to improve on. While teaching in my clinical, I tried to do this every chance possible. I would always make comments on students' papers. I would also offer verbal feedback as I walked around the room watching students work. Marzano talks about how necessary it is to do this and that it needs to be done in a timely fashion. Part of the unit that I taught had students to write fairy tales as a group. For instance, a group of five would have a five paragraph fairy tale, with each student writing a paragraph. During this process, I was constantly walking around the room making sure that each person was doing his/her part. When I saw a student who was writing a good descriptive paragraph, I would tell them "good job". If I saw that someone was slacking or needed some direction with their writing, I would give them encouragement or the 'how to' to achieve this. Providing feedback and praise/encouragement are very similar. Students need to hear what they are doing right, as well as, what they need to work on. A constant marking of papers that portrays only the bad things that a student has done offers no intiative to do better. Providing feedback that is positive and getting it back to students quickly so that they can remember what they were doing and correct it is essential to making education more important for the student. The teacher I worked with did an excellent job of this, and I tried to do the same. The fairy tales were graded that night (as I watched "Dancing with the Stars") and returned to the students the following day. This kept them familiar with what they had written and made the editing process much easier to accomplish. The benefits of providing immediate, encouraging feedback is a no-brainer! We like it as college students, and school-age students like it as well!