Suisun Valley Virtual Book Club: Kids Deserve It: Pushing Boundaries and Challenging Conventional Thinking
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7 Things to Remember About Feedback
1. Feedback is not advice, praise, or evaluation. Feedback is information about how we are doing in our efforts to a goal.
2. If students know the classroom is a safe place to make mistakes, they are more likely to use feedback for learning.
3. The feedback students give teachers can be more powerful than the feedback teachers give students.
4. When we give a grade as a part of our feedback, students routinely read only as far as the grade.
5. Effective feedback occurs during the learning, while there is still time to act on it.
6. Most of the feedback that students receive about their classroom work is from other students – and much of that feedback is wrong.
7. Students need to know their learning target—the specific skill they’re supposed to learn—or else “feedback” is just someone telling them what to do.
“Data doesn’t belong to the teacher. The data belongs to the student and is on loan to you.” --Damen Lopez
Developing a Commitment to Common
Assessment Practices
(Damen Lopez)
The most successful teams display
a clear purpose on the way that they take a joint effort to utilize valuable
assessment practices. These teams exhibit the following characteristics:
1. Speak the same language, the language of
data. Successful teams continue to go back to the numbers.
While emotion is often an important quality that helps us to nurture and
teach from the heart, getting results is the ultimate goal. If a team is
kind and nurturing, but their students are failing then they have not done
their job. Take the emotion out of the situation and look at the numbers.
2. Share data
openly with one another. One of the most difficult
things for us to do as a teacher is to share our data. We hide it out of
embarrassment or fear of being judged. Successful teams make commitments
to looking openly at their data with the purpose to not cast blame, but to help
one another.
3. Take responsibility for
all students. The easiest way for teams to get over their fear of
sharing data is to decide that they are responsible as a whole for every
student. Being a team means working interdependently. This starts
with the way you collaborate about students.
4. Tie assessment to strategies and
interventions that work. It is often said we are “data rich and
information poor.” No one would argue the fact that assessments are
crucial to ensuring academic success for students. However, assessments
that are given without plans to turn data into strategies that create success
for students are useless. Simply put: Once you know where
students stand, it is your responsibility to make use of that information and
generate academic success as you teach them. The data you collected during your
grade level meeting is your starting point.
Observable Fish Moments at SV:
Be There: Eat lunch with a student that you may have a difficult time with. BUILD A RELATIONSHIP WITH THEM!
Play: Thank you Mr. Kimble for organizing a fun staff event this morning. Vicky thank you for organizing our all in day!!
Choose your attitude: BE POSITIVE!!!
Make Their Day: Thank you after school yard duty team. YOU GUYS ARE AMAZING!! SO proud of ALL of our staff and teachers!! Thank you Kristin for helping out! Thank you front office staff for working together and making breakfast treats and coffee this morning.
