Boom Goes the Dynamite… or almost

It is well documented that feedback is one of the most important tools used by teachers to enhance student learning. I have always had the mindset that feedback needs to be clear, timely and specific. As a physical and health education teacher, I’ve caught myself multiple times saying “good job” and “well done”. Unfortunately, my students aren’t learning anything from these thoughtless accounts on their participation or achievements. I hope I am not the only one, but I often have difficulty supplying my students with continuous feedback that I can genuinely say is meaningful to them.

Hattie and Timperley (2007) proclaim that feedback must answer three major questions:

1) Where am I going? (in relation to the learning objectives)

2) How am I going? (how does the current performance relate to the learning goals?)

3) Where to next? (what can be done to improve my performance?)

So, in my honest opinion, I would say my feedback to students is an area that needs vast improvement. My end goal as an educator is for students to learn and, I can say this confidently, effective feedback has the power to greatly influence learning.

Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick (2006) believe feedback needs to be student-centred. Students should take time to reflect on their own work and be more actively involved with feedback on their learning experiences. How great would that be? Ongoing conversations with student about the feedback given to their work. As a student, I was guilty of skimming over, or even ignoring, written comments to a test or essay to go straight to the letter grade.

This leads to my action plan: what can I do to effectively provide clear and specific feedback to students while also making this a student-centred process?

Boom! Google Apps for Education comes to mind when assisting this process. I am currently working on an e-portfolio, or as the PYP PE guru Andy Vasily calls it, the “sportfolio”. For the  past year or so, I have been wanting to construct an online portfolio that really showed student learning. Historically, PE is a subject area can sometimes be difficult to showcase learning unless you are in the gym doing something active (for the record, just being active is far from what should actually takes place in a PE class). So why not have student-led conferences where students do not actually need to go to the gym to show their learning? Why not show their learning to parents via an electronic portfolio aka the e-sportfolio?

My vision began first with wanting to create a website that would track student reflections, assessments, etc. Then I moved to using a Google Doc. I made a simple template for every student and shared it via Hapara (or doctopus for the non-Hapara’s) so all students had the same template. My students do a lot of forms in my PE classes so I really wanted to get this information to look presentable/readable on a Doc. Well, fortunately, being introduced to docAppender a few months ago has helped this process out. All of the data in those Google Sheets are automatically and crisply laid out on a Doc creating a running record of reflections and assessments.

So there’s my framework. But now what? It’s still not even close to where I want this portfolio to be.

1) Goobric? Haven’t really played around with it as much as I’d like but would this be an add-on to explore further to show student progress and provide more meaningful feedback?

2) I mentioned earlier about the feedback being student-centred. I’m currently writing comments on the side bar of the Doc with students responding but, is there something better? Students can simply close the conversation and BOOM. Our “conversation” is no longer there.

3) What about the add-on Kaizena? This add-on, which I clearly need to sit down and play with for days, appears to be a really good fit for what I want.

4) What else is there? I don’t want to disrespect feedback and leave anything out.

I think I’ve got my firework, or atleast, sparkler boom (they kinda boom, right?) but I’m still looking for the dynamite.