Enhancing the Effectiveness of Teacher Feedback in the Secondary Writing Classroom

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Enhancing the Effectiveness of Teacher Feedback
in the Secondary Writing Classroom

• Icy Lee

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(No Transcript)
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Prevalent Practices and Problems
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Practice I Problem
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Practice II Problem
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Practice III Problem
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Practice IV Problem
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Practice V Problem
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Practice VI Problem
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Practice VII Problem
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In a nutshell

• Something seems radically amiss in
• teachers current feedback practices
• Effective learning is not taking place.
• Teachers are exhausted and stressed out.
• Students are frustrated and demotivated.

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• Getting to the heart of the matter

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Missing link between teaching, learning and
assessment

• Teacher feedback is used for summative rather
  than formative purposes.
• The focus is on testing rather than teaching and
  learning.

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Learning-teaching-assessment cycle in the writing
classroom

• Teaching
• Select learning
• objectives
• Plan learning and
• assessment
• activities

• Assessment
• Provide feedback
• on student writing
• Check / monitor / record
• students writing
• performance against
• criteria

• Learning
• Writing
• tasks

Formative Assessment
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To enhance the effectiveness of teacher feedback

• Teacher feedback should have a positive washback
  effect on teaching and learning, allowing
  teachers to
• advise students,
• monitor their learning
• and fine-tune instruction, and
• providing opportunities for students
• to improve their learning.
• Teacher feedback should be utilized for formative
  purposes.

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Formative nature of teacher feedback

• Respond to students writing for formative
  purposes
• Tell students their strengths and what needs to
  be done in terms of their writing (i.e. areas for
  improvement) provide balanced coverage on
  content, organization and language, etc.
• Communicate the information clearly to students
  feedback should be made intelligible to students
  in terms of what they have learnt.
• Let students act on teacher feedback provide
  students with opportunities to improve their
  writing based on teacher feedback.
• Teach but not just test writing assess student
  writing to find out what needs to be learnt and
  taught.

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Teaching of writing

• Design a writing programme that integrates
  process, purpose and content (Hyland, 2003).
• Develop writing tasks accordingly
• (e.g. using genre as organizing principle).
• Develop specific assessment criteria for each
  writing task.
• Spell out criteria clearly for students.

• Integrate teaching and assessment - familiarize
  students with assessment criteria through
  reading-writing practice activities such as
  mini-text analysis and text improvement
  activities.
• Engage students in peer /self-evaluation. As they
  apply the criteria, they become better informed
  about the requirements of good writing (for
  specific genres).
• Provide students with a language for discussing
  their writing.

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Assessing writing

• Provide balanced coverage on content, structure,
  organization, language and style.
• Respond to writing based on criteria that have
  been communicated and taught to students, rather
  than giving decontextualized and ad-hoc responses
  to errors.
• Could use a feedback form that contains specific
  criteria for the writing task criteria that
  have been taught and communicated to the
  learners.
• Need not mark every single student text some
  student texts can be subjected to self / peer
  evaluation.

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Assessing writing Treatment of errors

• De-emphasize error feedback.
• Respond to errors selectively.
• Involve learners actively teachers cant learn
  for students learning can only be done by
  students themselves.
• Encourage students to take greater responsibility
  for learning e.g. ask students to track their
  own errors (e.g. using error logs) negotiate
  with students on error patterns they want you to
  respond to.
• Treat language errors in follow-up grammar
  workshops and through peer editing /
  self-editing.
• Strengthen grammar instruction so that feedback
  is tied in with grammar instruction.

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Learning of writing

• Let students resubmit a draft, giving them an
  opportunity to act on teacher feedback (thus
  closing the gaps identified).
• If process pedagogy is not used,
• ask students to write another
• text on the same genre taught.

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Bringing together learning, teaching and
assessment

• Teaching, learning and assessment of writing
  should be brought together in the
  learning-teaching-assessment cycle.
• How we assess writing cannot be divorced from how
  we teach writing and how students learn writing.

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Tips for teachers

• Review your writing instruction and plan a
  comprehensive writing programme.
• Formulate feedback policy in the light of writing
  instruction.

• Communicate goals and expectations clearly to
  students, so that they have a more active role to
  play in the learning-teaching-assessment cycle.
• Provide students with opportunities to act on
  teacher feedback engage them in the learning of
  writing rather than reduce them to passive
  testees.
• Let students take greater responsibility for
  learning by allowing them to exercise greater
  control in the formative assessment process.

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Implementation

• Develop a concrete action plan
• Secure support of school leaders
• Work with colleagues
• Start small
• Monitor progress
• Evaluate process of change

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Mark less, but mark better

• Stop being
• composition slaves!