I wrote the following piece of pedagogical documentation back in 2015 as my final project for Project Zero's course, "Making Learning Visible: The Power of Group Learning and Documentation in Classrooms and Communities." This course is run by the Harvard School of Graduate Education. It seems appropriate to share it now, not only because it's Halloween but because all of the children have moved on to high school and cannot be identified.
This piece of writing marks a pivotal point in my understanding of how even very young children can be taught to provide each other with effective feedback, and how that feedback can have a profound effect on the quality of their writing.
Context
This term during library lessons, Year One have been collaborating to write a new book every week. The aim is to have each child contribute to a page. Not all of the children are able to write independently yet, so children were provided with opportunities to write with a partner. To further support students, the collaborative texts were modelled on the language structure and images of a mentor text.
The lesson documented here is the third in this series of lessons.
In this lesson, the mentor text was I'm Green and I'm Grumpy! by Alison Lester.
(You can find a video of Alison reading her text aloud here.)
We began by reading the book and talking about how the clues allowed us to guess which character was hiding behind the door.
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On page 1 we learn who is hiding in the cupboard; On page 2 (the speech bubble on the door), we are given clues about their costume to help us guess |
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| Opening the door reveals the answer on page 3 |
The writing task
The students were asked to divide themselves into groups of two or three. I gave them the separate pages of the scaffold modelled on the original text.
They had fifteen minutes to:
- Copy the language pattern in the book by filling in a name and the appropriate pronoun (page 1).
- Write some clues on a speech bubble on the door that could be used by the reader to correctly guess who was hiding behind the door (page 2).
- Decide who was hiding in the cupboard, draw them and write their character name in another speech bubble (page 3).
- Borrow two library books each!
Where to next?
At the end of the lesson, about half the class had finished the writing component of their pages. Of the other half, most were almost finished but not enough for their pages to make sense within the context of the book. Students' commitment to the task was obvious so I decided that rather than creating another new book next lesson, we would finish this one. But before they could do that successfully, they needed some feedback about their work in progress.
I made the completed pages into a book and looked at the remaining unfinished pages to identify what feedback students would need to receive in order to be successful. I wrote a series of post-it notes to guide students' efforts. However, after discussing this approach with a colleague, I decided to take the post-it notes off and instead give students the opportunity to give and receive feedback from each other.
Hattie (2012) identifies feedback as crucial to student achievement. His analysis of multiple studies has shown that on average, it has twice the impact of all other schooling effects; however not all forms of feedback that students receive are equally effective. He cites Nuthall's conclusions that while as much as 80 percent of verbal feedback received by students comes from their peers, much of it is incorrect (Nuthall, 2007, cited by Hattie op.cit.).
I wondered:
- How can I support students to give each other effective feedback?
- What impact will the children's feedback have on the work of their peers?
- How effective would their feedback to each other be, when compare to teacher feedback?
In the next lesson, instead of reading another commercially-published picture book and starting a new book-making activity, I read the completed pages of our picture book: Who's that hiding in the cupboard?
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| Image courtesy of Silvia Rosenthal Tosilano @langwitches |
As we read our book we described what we saw, thought about the connections we could make with our model text and asked and answered wonder questions that would help students figure out what they had to do next to meet our learning objective: to complete a page for our class book using the same language structures and features as our modelled text.
As I read, we tried to see if we could figure out who was hiding inside the cupboard. If we felt we could guess correctly, we thought about which part of the clue had made it easy.
If it was hard to guess who was hiding behind the door, we wondered, "What other clues would have helped?"
Giving each other feedback
After modelling the thinking routine, students whose work was already in the book were teamed up to provide feedback to students who were yet to finish. Once again, the children worked independently while I scanned their library books. In the heat of the lesson there were few opportunities for me to take photographs or document conversations. However from the circulation desk I observed groups of children drawing and writing together, huddled around the same pieces of paper. I wondered what impact the feedback would have on their work and whether their collaborations would be fruitful. By the end of the lesson fifteen minutes later, all the pages of the book were completed - and everyone had borrowed two library books.
Determining the impact of student feedback
The following images show student work before and after our feedback lesson. The 'Before' images include the post-it notes that I wrote to identify the areas where I thought they needed to improve.
I removed all post-it notes before the lesson and did not share them with the students.
- There are sometimes fewer pages shown in the 'Before' image because I only photographed those pages where I was intending to give feedback: I assumed the other pages were already finished.
- The 'After' images show the students' work after they received peer feedback and their pages were bound into our book.
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As well as the written clues, many other visual embellishments were added. For example, the pages are all highly coloured with multiple layers that the girls completed together. On the first page it is possible to distinguish three separate illustrators, each person drawing another character. This group of six were proud of their collective effort: all added their names to the back of the completed pages to claim joint ownership of their work (not shown) and wrote, "we're the best girls," inside a read circle in the top left corner of the first page. |
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| During our feedback class the boys added a detailed image that matched their original clue. However they also added the second written clue. I can see that it's written in the same handwriting as the first clue, which makes me think that both were written by the same person. Even if this clue was added by the writer in response to our class discussion, I wonder what role an audience of his peers played in his decision to add an additional clue? |
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| The left page and the clues on the door have been completed in the same handwriting as the first word and using the same blue pencil. This points to continuity in authorship across time, suggesting that it was the original author who added their ideas during our feedback lesson. The words on the final page are written in red and the handwriting is different to the the other two pages - note the difference in the formation of the 'a' and the 'm.' While written by two different authors, the clues and the answer match. This shows that the collaboration between Will and George that started in the first lesson continued in the second, and suggest that changes were made based upon feedback. The door has been coloured in and additional details have been added to the drawing, showing that the students considered the aesthetic appeal of the page to be important - even thought this was not explicitly stated by me. |
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| After the feedback lesson, the boys were able to complete all aspects of the task, despite my post-it notes having been removed. In addition, the zombie has been redrawn and coloured and now occupies a much larger proportion of the space, showing that they have thought carefully about how this page will be viewed by the reader. More significantly, the specific clues leave the reader in no doubt about who is hiding behind the door. |
Analysis
At the end of this process, I still found myself wondering, "Whose feedback was most useful to the children: the whole class feedback given by me, or the student-to-student feedback the children gave each other?"
Hattie (2012) identifies three different levels of feedback that help advance student achievement: task/product feedback, process feedback and self regulation.
Feedback at the task level helps students determine if they have completed a task or if a response is right or wrong. It helps students build 'surface knowledge.'
Process feedback concerns itself with the thinking processes a student must use in order to complete a task including providing students with strategies to identify errors and explicitly teaching them how to learn from their mistakes.
Feedback that focuses on self-regulation provides students with the skills to self-monitor and to achieve a deeper level of learning.
When students can monitor and self-regulate their learning, they can use feedback more effectively to reduce discrepancies between where they are in their learning and the desired outcomes or successes of their learning (Hattie, 2021 p 134).
This form of feedback is most often in the form of reflective or probing questions.
Then came the realisation that it was the lesson in its entirety that had enabled the students to achieve a high level of collective success: the collaboration between teacher and students used all three levels of feedback as identified by Hattie.
- "What I can see..." related to the students' work as they attempted to complete the task and involved identifying which elements were present/missing. My intended post-it notes to give students directions that would enable them to complete their work are an example of feedback at this most basic level. By removing them and replacing them with our whole class discussion, students were able to revisit the task instructions then collaborate to ensure that everyone completed the task without written scaffolding from me.
- "What it makes me think..." related to the thinking processes that a piece of student work inspired. For example, as students read each others' clues, they were engaged in evaluating the effectiveness of the clues. Our class discussion gave students the skills to be able to do this effectively for themselves and each other.
- As they asked, "I wonder..." questions, students engaged each other in self-regulatory feedback because they challenged each other to reflect upon other strategies they might use to improve their work.
Implications
This documentation shows the positive impact that teaching students to give each other feedback can have on their work. Revisiting the completed pages of the book at the beginning of the lesson not only accorded value to student work already completed, it also gave students another opportunity to rethink their own work in relation to the learning goals. By using completed work samples to model the feedback routine of See- Think- Wonder, students had a tool that they could use to respectfully critique each others' work that traversed all three levels of effective feedback.
Without the evidence of recorded conversations it's hard to judge whether students' feedback to each other followed the thinking routine. This makes it hard to separate out which specific parts of students' successful editing was due to the additional input from me at the beginning of the lesson, and how much to the feedback from other students. Either way, it is clear that the lesson on giving feedback lead students to create work of a high standard.
The feedback I had planned to give focused on only one or two elements of the task. However, when the responsibility for offering feedback on specific work was given back to the students, the quality of editing went beyond my expectations. Students gave greater consideration to their readers as they completed all parts of the task and added or edited clues that would help them infer correctly, and changed text structures so that they more closely echoed those of our mentor text.
It also appears that the feedback students gave went beyond the elements of the task that were explicitly taught, to include aesthetic and social considerations. Students redrew, added and coloured images. They valued the opportunity to think critically together: to improve the standard of their own work and to offer feedback that would assist their peers. Their sense of shared ownership of the edited work showed that they often saw the act of feedback as also an act of collaboration.
As I reflect on this from the vantage point of 2021, I find myself asking new questions:
- What did the students giving feedback learn as a result of their experience? (Self-regulation)
- To what extent might students who received feedback be able to identify how it helped them? (Process)
- What did students learn about how to provide effective feedback to each other? (Task)
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