Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Alfie Kohn
For example, if a student writes a reflection after completing an essay speaking to areas they have been working on and their perception of personal growth, the teacher can read the reflection and tailor feedback appropriately for that particular learner.
One major mistake many educators make is trying to identify and address every error or challenge a student has in a paper.
prepare players for an upcoming game or meet. Coaches don’t put a score on the scoreboard during practices; that only happens during the game.
To grade or rate them sends the subtle message that their current achievement is fixed. This is the exact opposite of the mentality needed to sustain growth and improvement.
Rather than give students a low grade and rubber-stamp them onto the next level, I give students time to revisit and demonstrate mastery of those targets.
I call my approach all-feedback-no-grades,
You can check out our class feedback resources at Mindset.MythFolklore.net.
When teachers give feedback together with a grade, the students see the feedback as justification for the grade, but if there is feedback without a grade, then students can see the feedback for its own sake and act on
Learners need the freedom to make mistakes in order to learn from those mistakes; they should not be punished for making mistakes.
The most powerful feedback feeds into a revision process so that students can see their work improve over time, iterating and reiterating as needed.
But when you get rid of grades, revision is no longer a reward, and it is no longer a punishment; it’s just what you do in order to improve and learn more.
The single biggest challenge I face as a teacher is helping students to free themselves from that habit of doing the minimum.
far prefer assignments that have a long-lasting purpose, assignments that the students themselves can use later in the semester, and assignments that have an even more lasting value. My
“What is success in this class for you? And how can I help you achieve it?”
“Alienation in school is the number one learning problem, depressing academic performance and elevating student resistance.”
incorporating the most important part of learning into your curriculum: metacognitive reflections about the activities themselves.
In a classroom, students might discuss what they consider to be most important in a project and then define categories for evaluation accordingly, such as depth of research, originality of thesis or argument, persuasiveness, clarity of the writing, examples, application, and the significance of the project.
Collaborative, Peer-led Unit on a Selected Literacy Students will work in teams of two (or, in some cases, three) and will be responsible for a literacy, a unit of work that will occupy us for two or sometimes (when there is a visitor or an event) three class sessions. Typically students will make a presentation, guide a reading, or conduct a field trip one class and then will do follow-up, with the help of the instructor, in the second class. No talking heads please! Think of ways to make your presentation as interactive, engaged, thoughtful, and inspiring as possible.
lieu of a traditional midterm exam, the class will, collectively and using a wiki, create a concise blog post tying together key lessons and insights about twenty-first-century literacies studied in the first half of the class, will post the finished blog on the www.HASTAC.org website, and then will work on a social media campaign to draw attention to the blog through your own various social networks. The instructor will open the wiki with the challenge topic: What are twenty-first-century literacies? Students are invited to change the topic in the course of the online discussion. At the
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You will turn your work on your peer-led literacy unit into a video that will be hosted on the HASTAC YouTube channel and will be open to the public at large. The rough cuts will be viewed during the last week of class as a recap of the entire class and will receive feedback from the class, and then final versions must be submitted for uploading to the YouTube channel by final exam day.
Katopodis offered students a list of thought topics for their consideration in the forms below. These topics focus on student preparedness, group leadership, volunteerism, good listening, and other service qualities students can apply and improve on in the future.
The time spent with the same five to six students throughout the semester enables peers to give more detailed qualitative feedback in their evaluations.
At the end of the semester in this particular class, students determined, through self- and peer evaluations, a recommended grade for themselves as well as for each of their group members—but only after they provided detailed, qualitative assessments of their work according to the forms below.
disassociating participation from talking to think instead about participation as both service and leadership within a democratic community.
In the end the students’ evaluations of one another were so constructively and sensitively framed, serious, and sophisticated that the instructor, with permission, shared peer feedback anonymously with each student.
everyone in the course became a teacher, a coteacher and a colearner.
I replaced grading with critiquing. I replaced weekly (or longer) one-and-done assignments with a continuous do-review-redo submission process. I subsequently
The course requires students to master some basic computer science ideas that are typically underemphasized in introductory courses,
A number of tools provide reusable feedback functionality, such as Turnitin, QuickMark, and eMarking Assistant. Teachers have made clever use of Google Keep and similar tools to store text clippings.4
make this work, it’s important to categorize exercises and critiques by the associated microskills and content elements.
Ideally any important skill should be reflected in three or more warm-up exercises and in at least one challenge exercise.
Every row will be reduced to a number, even though the boundaries between columns will be blurry, given terms such as most and some and subjective criteria such as “fairly easy to read.”
These hard-to-justify individual numbers are then summed to create an even less-well-justified total.
Anything not listed in a rubric row doesn’t count, such as using a creative approach to the solution.
Single-point rubrics are a popular way to deal with many of these weaknesses of analytic rubrics. For each row the only fixed content is the criteria for acceptance.
When not done, comments specific to the work are written to identify what needs to change.
Similarly comments specific ...
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are written to note aspects that go above and beyond...
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The biggest challenge for students with critique-driven learning is the lack of specific due dates in the do-review-redo process.
The critique-driven approach worked quite well, for example, in a pilot course I was involved with a decade ago teaching business writing (memos, emails, meeting summaries, and such) to English as a Second Language learners. The
as much as getting a better grade. Critique-driven learning’s emphasis on mastery only works if students want to master the skills involved.
Two developers work on one computer developing code. One developer drives (i.e., types the code) and the other developer navigates (i.e., plans and dictates the code). The driver takes care of the details, making microdecisions and asking questions about specific choices. The navigator worries about the bigger picture, where the code is going, how it might be tested, and so on. In situations where one developer is more skilled than the other, the less skilled developer drives. This leads to just-in-time learning.
Swarming is when the entire team works in one room, usually in pairs, on related parts of a common task. The
Alfie Kohn’s important contributions to the topic. His assessment that “the more students are led to focus on how well they’re doing, the less engaged they tend to be with what they’re doing”
for four of the top five essential skills (as rated by employers), students rated themselves much higher in proficiency than their employers rated them.
asked my students whether they knew what they received on their last test in any class before they got it back.
I am tired of hearing from friends who were shocked by their latest performance review. I am tired of hearing from friends who had been fired when they didn’t see it coming from a mile away. You should know exactly (or close to it) what your boss is going to tell you when you walk into your yearly performance review. And you should have a say in the review itself—otherwise it would be considered unfair. Why are grades any different?
Perhaps the first step is to minimize grades, as Geni, Anderson,
and Sarah Donovan suggest.12 Perhaps students could evaluate the quality in their work in a way that mirrors teacher practices.13 Perhaps students should be the ones providing evidence of their own learning in a student-led conference or portfolio.
For me the first few things taken out of grade calculation were things like effort, attendance, participation, zeros, and extra credit.
