Dialogic Feedback

What is it about Google? I mean, everything they do seems to work. And all they ask for in return ...is your identity.

Anyway, the latest thing I'm using in exchange for my soul is a feedback form, shared with the student, where we can have a dialogue about their work. Really simple idea but it's proving almost revolutionary in its simplicity and effectiveness using a Google Doc.

I get a piece of work in (or the student gives me a link to their work) - I write some ideas on how to improve it on their feedback sheet and they have to respond. The pro-forma is very simple - looks a bit like this:

Date / Teacher Feedback:

Date / Student Actions:

Date / Teacher Feedback:

Date / Student Actions:

...you get the idea.

But what's amazing about this is that I can have a whole class set of feedback forms in one folder and Google will tell me, down the right hand side of the screen, which student has written any actions on their form in the last day / week. At a glance I can tell whose thinking about Psychology outside of the classroom ...and who is not. Who is taking action on improving their work ...and who is not.

Not only this but I'm gradually building up a fantastic record of all the work the student and I are doing throughout the year to maximise their understanding and exam success.

What's the point of teachers?

I mean, I know teachers are needed to keep children moving around the building we call a 'school'. Actually, I can even buy the idea that we are needed within that building to answer questions or, at least, to set students in the right direction to answer their own questions, or, even more at least, to show them some of the skills of finding stuff out and making sense of it. So I suppose what I really mean is, 'What's the point of lessons?'

Here's why I'm questioning it all. I've recently come to the end of a two-year A level course, 'teaching' students about psychology. Only, something interesting happened in the run-up to the exams. The students started to do something they called 'revising.' Nothing new about that, except that what they really meant was 'learning' and as far as I could tell this was more-or-less learning from scratch, as if we hadn't really done any real 'learning' for the previous year or two.

This strikes a chord because I've noticed, in previous years, my own inclination to race through a syllabus in order to 'cover' it as quickly as possible and get into 'revision lessons'. What!? Maybe I was kidding myself! Maybe what I really meant was that I wanted to cover the syllabus quickly in order to get on to the 'learning lessons.' That is, spend MOST OF THE YEAR getting something out of the way before I could start getting into the business of learning!? Well if that's the case I really need to know what this 'covering' business is. This thing that's taking up most of the time.

Maybe it's this: it's a pointless exercise that we ('we' being teacher and students) go through for a number of reasons:

1. It's the way it's always been done (I have no idea if that's true by the way)
2. We all feel better, safe in the knowledge that we've covered everything we need to cover for the exam: we've 'got it covered'
3. You can do really satisfying things like write a lovely clear 'Scheme of Work' which sets out, at the start of the year, exactly how you are going to 'cover' everything you need to cover so that we've all got it covered.
4. It probably lends itself to the school set-up where you have a set timetable with a sequence of lessons
5. I can't think of anything else

Okay, so what's the alternative?

Well, I've seen the alternative in action because it's exactly what was happening when the students I mentioned earlier got into what they thought of as 'revision' mode. First off, they figured out all kinds of different ways of learning stuff that worked for them. Two of the boys started working together  writing flash cards and testing each other in such a good-humoured way that it was like watching an on-going Morecombe and Wise sketch (a reference they would probably be nonplussed by). One of the girls produced a beautifully presented artists sketch book with notes, cut-outs, images, etc. Another girl bombarded me with exam-style questions she'd answered, asking for feedback. Someone else produced a poster with every element of the Child Psychology topic on it, in the shape of a child (genius!) Someone else really took to my own favourite way of figuring stuff out which is to create a model (flowchart-like) of complex theories.

Yes, the 'lessons' I conducted when 'covering' the syllabus included some of these things but here's the difference: during the 'revision' mode the students were figuring out how they wanted to work and what areas they really needed to work on. I was just there to help.

Now then, what if we just got straight into these 'revision' lessons right from the start of the year? Even before there's anything to 'revise'? What would the problems be?

1. The students might not 'cover' everything. That's pathetic - give them a list.
2. The teacher doesn't get a chance to inspire and enthuse the students about their subject. I've just freed-up about 6 months of lesson time within which, rather than 'covering' stuff you can spend a bit of time explaining some of the elements of the subject that got you into it in the first place.
3. The teacher won't know at what level the students are working. You could talk to them? You could still set tests?

I can't really think of anything else. So that's it - I'm trying it from Sept and the 'Scheme of Work' is in the bin. Or maybe, what I'm looking for is 'Flipped Learning'?

A War On Labelling Children

I am repeatedly asked to put forward the names of the 'Gifted and Talented' students in my classes. Given that I teach psychology I am, I presume, being asked to suggest who has the 'gift' of an innate ability in psychology.  ....really? I mean ...REALLY? Wouldn't it be more realistic to ask, 'Which child in your class  has had a stable, supportive background with parents who have been keen to stimulate and encourage their child at home and have been successful in engendering high aspiration and a sense of agency and academic self-worth since they were born?' Okay, it doesn't have the same ring as 'G&T' but at least it doesn't rest on subjective, fairy-tale notions such as 'Gift.'

Let's take the other end of the spectrum. Recently I was covering a lesson for a colleague. This was a bottom set English group of 13/14 year-old children. The first thing that happened was that one of the boys handed me a report card which had on it his target for each lesson. The target was to stay in the room for the duration of the lesson.... Think about the sub-text of that: 'We don't really care that you're not going to learn anything [because you're a 'Low Achiever'], but please don't bother us by wandering around the school: just make sure you're physically present in each room you're supposed to be in.'

Then there was the work which had been set for them: read some text about bananas and make a list of the key points. There was an exemplar on the next page which showed the students what a list looks like. It turns out that a list is a given number of points all stacked on top of each other. Looking at this work I started to wonder whether even I was going to manage to stay physically present in this room for an hour.

A quick chat with some of the these kids was ample time to see that they were absolutely as capable as their counterparts in the top set. What they didn't have was much sense of how and why they should expend effort on the work being given to them. How and why they should dare to fight back against the messages and LABELS they have obviously been deluged with for years both implicitly and explicitly: bottom set, low achiever, E grade student, NOT gifted, NOT talented.

But these labels are never good, not even for the those being labelled 'Gifted' or 'A grade student.' There are many students I see towards the end of their schooling who have learned how to work our system and have always gained A grades. On one level, that's great - they've often worked hard to do that. But here's the problem: what they have learned from our system is that it is all about the outcome (the grade). Not only that, but the outcome somehow personally reflects on who they are. These students are now TERRIFIED of getting a B, or a C, or worse... This, in turn, means that what they want from me, as their teacher, is quite simple: what do I write in this A level exam to get an A? Anything which deviates from this is often met with something close to hostility in such students. And yet, exam boards are (rightly) wise to such an approach and so, increasingly, they are constructing exams which require thought and understanding rather than memory and pre-learned answers.

These A grade students are a classic example of what Carol Dweck refers to as Fixed Mindset: they do not really value the process of learning, only the outcome. When they make a mistake they see no opportunity, only personal failure. Similarly, the students in the bottom set English group have a Fixed Mindset: they do not really believe that they are capable of success, so why put in the effort?

The opposite of this is Growth Mindset, where the process of learning is valued. Mistakes are opportunities to learn, therefore risk is highly valued and learning is always worth the effort, for its own sake. When a child thinks like this, Dweck has shown that they are likely to surprise both us and themselves in terms of the outcomes. Dweck also shows that it is relatively easy to get students to adopt a Growth Mindset.

So how have the students mentioned above learned to adopt a Fixed Mindset? To my mind, it starts and ends with the labels we give them: Bright, Gifted, Talented ....High Achiever. It is never alright to label young people who are developing rapidly and whose extraordinary potential most of us adults have no idea of.