Constructing Success Criteria with Students by Jennifer Gonzalez on CultOfPedagogy.com
Grading should remember the five SEL competencies
- Self-awareness
- Self-management
- Social awareness
- Relationship skills
- Responsible decision making
Can be done at multiple levels
Work through criteria with students to help them build a full understanding of it, or have students help decide what criteria would be meaningful for them
– This clearly is speaking about in-person, live contexts. Is there a way to translate this to online, asynchronous context?
You have to seriously consider student feedback or it won’t work
Why?
– Don’t assume the criteria you write is as clear as you think it is
– It improves instructional planning because you learn where students feel comfortable
– It improves students’ ability to assess themselves and each other
- Unpack standards and embed the language
- get students familiar with the standards that will drive your instruction and get them used to using the language of those standards
- have students dissect the standards and build concepts of what successfully meeting that standard would look like
- Study and annotate the assignment
- give students the prompt or assignment that they are going to be working on (with a rubric is great!)
- Have them read it carefully, annotating it by highlighting important words or phrases and writing comments or questions in the margins (should be trying to answer the question, “What does success look like?”
- Study exemplars
- give students the opportunity to look at good examples of completed assignments
- have them identify what they’re noticing in the exemplars
- Identify instructional needs
- have them identify where they are going to need instructional support
By including students in the assessment process, we help them take charge of their own learning
4 Ways to Boost Critical Thinking with Mistake Analysis by Colin Seale on CultOfPedagogy.com
You should ask, “How does this feedback help understand, diagnose, and correct what the potential misunderstanding is?”
Feedback should not be, “Yes, you got this right,” or “No, that’s incorrect.” It should reorient the learner towards what is the correct answer
Students cannot develop into critical thinkers if they regularly freeze out of the fear of making a mistake, so we have to remove the stakes from mistakes
Critical thinking should not be luxury good. But our current system often treats it that way, setting aside this kind of challenging work for only the most advanced students.
– !!!
– “We can talk about implicit bias all day, but what about the explicit bias of saying “These kids can’t”? What “These kids can’t” often means is “As an educator, I have no idea how to create learning conditions such that all kids can.””
4 ways to implement mistake analysis:
- Anticipate “good” mistakes
- think ahead about the kinds of mistakes students are most likely to make
- don’t stop at identifying WHAT students may do incorrectly; make sure you think about WHY the mistake may happen so you can do a better job in your instruction to show them HOW to prevent that mistake
- Use probing questions to grapple with “good” mistakes in real time
- probing into why a student made the mistake helps you both learn 1) where their misunderstanding is coming from and 2) how to find the correct answer
- Ask students to create their own “good” mistakes
- have students anticipate predictable mistakes that might be made on a task
- keep students focused on realistic mistakes, not fantastical ones
- Which wrong is more “right”?
- can also be an opportunity to introduce conflict, drama, and meaningful opportunities to write and debate across content areas
- asking which wrong is more “right” helps learners shift from asking “what” and “how to” to asking “why” and “what if”
- a necessary shift for giving students the tools to not just analyze the world as it is, but imagine it as it ought to be