Using DIRT as a Learning Journey Education is full of acronyms. Some are useless, whilst others are impressive and useful. One such acronym which keeps popping up in the #UKEdChat community is DIRT, which stands for ‘Dedicated Improvement and Reflection Time‘, mainly aimed at secondary aged pupils (11+), although some aspects are already embedded within primary practice. In her book, Jackie Beere reminds how important the process of DIRT is: This is properly trained peer assessment or self-assessment where students measure their progress against the original objective in mini plenaries and think about how they have learned – what worked and what didn’t. Mainly used by Secondary School English teachers, David Didau (@LearningSpy) and Alex Quigley (@HuntingEnglish) have shared how the process is used in their classrooms, at their blogs here & here, but the potential of using a DIRT framework is possible in other curriculum subject, using the following Assessment for Learning tips: Dialogue – Talking to students is key.
Marking is an act of love UPDATE: After a lot of thought and reading, I’m no long convinced that marking is anywhere near as important or useful as it’s often claimed. In fact, much of it is a complete waste of time. In this post I explore the difference between marking and feedback and here I suggest that less marking might mean more feedback. October 2015 Have you ever flicked back through an exercise book and seen the same repeated comments followed with soul numbing certainty by the same repeated mistakes? There are few things more crushing to the spirit of hardworking teachers than this dramatically enacted evidence of the fact that, apparently, 70% of all feedback given by teachers to pupils falls on stony soil. I’ve always felt guilty about marking. I guess if you’re marking like I used to, then it’s easy to feel like this. The big difference is DIRT. At Clevedon School, this has been formalised into Triple Impact Marking: and Joe Kirby has also written about how using symbols can save precious time.
Marking Matters Like most teachers in the autumn term, I have set myself a few targets, some of them to do with marking. I’m going to make sure that I mark student work regularly, make it useful and get students to do something with it. In search of a bit of inspiration, I read two great blogs on this subject over the weekend. The second blog was by Mary Myatt (@MaryMyatt). “When it comes to giving feedback, reasons should always be given for the comment. So, these two articles made me reflect on a flow diagram that we have used at DHS to describe ‘effective feedback through marking’. Download a copy here. The key points from it are: Select the work that you are going to mark in detail carefully – make sure it is something that students have had to think about and produce themselves e.g. a paragraph of writing that describes and explains something. I’ve been doing DIRT with my Y10 and Y11 and they engage with it really well. Like this: Like Loading...
Getting feedback right Part 1 – Why do we give it It’s become a truism that feedback is the most important activity that teachers engage in. Feedback, we are repeatedly told, is tremendously powerful and therefore teachers must do more of it. Certainly Hattie, the Sutton Trust and the EEF bandy about impressive effect sizes, but the evidence of flipping through a pupil’s exercise book suggests that the vast majority of what teachers write is ignored or misunderstood. Teachers’ feedback can certainly have a huge impact but it’s a mistake to believe that this impact is always positive. The point he makes is that teachers’ feedback often has unintended consequences; if we’re not careful, it may have the exact opposite result to what we intended. To provide clarity – most mistakes are made because pupils are unclear on precisely what they should be doing. If we understood which of these purpose we were engaged in, our feedback might be a lot more useful and a lot more likely to produced the desired results. Like this: Like Loading...
Authentic Assessment Toolbox Home Page to the Authentic Assessment Toolbox, a how-to text on creating authentic tasks, rubrics, and standards for measuring and improving student learning. Inside, you will find chapters on A good place to start -- In this chapter I identify the characteristics, strengths and limitations of authentic assessment; compare and contrast it with traditional (test-based) assessment. Why has authentic assessment become more popular in recent years? When can it best serve assessment needs? After a brief overview, follow a detailed, four-step process for creating an authentic assessment. All good assessment begins with standards: statements of what we want our students to know and be able to do. Authentic assessments are often called "tasks" because they include real-world applications we ask students to perform. To assess the quality of student work on authentic tasks, teachers develop rubrics, or scoring scales. A guide to constructing good, multiple-choice tests, to complement your authentic assessments
@Westylish's Blog: The Impact of Personalised Video Feedback on Sixth Form Hi... This year I have been working on videoing the feedback that I am giving to my sixth form students. My AS class produced an essay on the extent to which Hitler's consolidation of power was achieved in a legal manner. I then videod the feedback and the students used the feedback to improve their original draft using DIRT. Initial reactions suggested that this method was a very effective way of disseminating feedback with the student voice being very positive and the DIRT showing that the students had made real progress towards their targets. Looking at what the students produced in their books and what they thought about the activity only got me so far. Yes, I was pleased with the impact that the video had on the students and their DIRT but would it have lasting impact? The students then produced a second essay on the reality of the 'Economic Miracle' within Nazi Germany. The students selected three targets that they received last time and applied them to this essay.
Effective Faculty Feedback: The Road Less Traveled, Assessing Writing, 2006 Grading papers may be one of the most stressful, most time consuming, and least rewarding activities in which professors engage. Although effective grading techniques for papers have been widely researched, especially within the "Writing" or "English" scholarly arenas, has this information been put into practice? The goals of this paper are two-fold: (1) to replicate and extend Connor and Lunsford's [Connors, R. J., & Lunsford, A. A. (1993). "Teachers' rhetorical comments on student papers." Elsevier. 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, FL 32887-4800.
5 Tips for a More Meaningful Rubric Sarah Wike Loyola , Upper School Spanish Teacher, Spanish Team Leader, and Technology Mentor in Charlotte, NC Posted 06/08/2015 12:26PM | Last Commented 07/06/2015 2:30PM Every educator feels pretty darn cool the first few times they grade students' work. What a powerful feeling it ignites in us, right? However, the reality of how much time we have to spend grading sets in quickly and the task becomes more and more monotonous. No teacher digs grading the same problems, essay prompts, responses, etc. over and over again, but it is a large part of what we do on a daily basis. So, why not make it meaningful? Teachers who use rubrics: set clear guidelines and expectations from the outset of the school year. hold students accountable for the work they produce in a justifiable way. let their students know on which areas they need concentrate the next time they are given a similar task. see improvement in their students’ work. Teachers who do not use rubrics: Be consistent. Still not convinced?
Using Rubrics A rubric is a type of scoring guide that assesses and articulates specific components and expectations for an assignment. Rubrics can be used for a variety of assignments: research papers, group projects, portfolios and presentations. Rubrics are most often used to grade written assignments, but they have many other uses. Boix Mansilla., V., Duraisingh, E., Wolfe, C. R., & Haynes, C. (2009). Brookes, D. Mora, J., & Ochoa, H. (2010). Reddy, Y., & Andrade, H. (2010). Stevens, D. and Levi, A. (2005) Introduction to Rubrics. Timmerman, B., Strickland, D. Tractenberg, R. How Rubrics Provide Feedback | Teaching, Writing | Chris Friend I’d like to start with an assumption about rubrics. I believe that rubrics are tools designed to serve two purposes:They help a teacher assess student work consistently and clearly.They help provide feedback to students through setting expectations and evaluating performance.With these two goals in mind—assessment and feedback—I’d like to examine how rubrics need to be built and used to be able to serve those purposes. I recently wrote about the different kinds of rubrics, and I’d like to focus exclusively on analytic (rather than holistic) rubrics in this discussion. I’ve seen a number of assignment rubrics that are poorly designed and poorly implemented, and I’d like to point out the trouble with a particular approach and show how it can be fixed. First, though, I need to clarify a critical term. That example includes all three elements of feedback. Note how the highlighted boxes in the table match the example comment quoted above. For a teacher, this can be huge. Tags: Teaching
Grading, Assessment, or Feedback? | Teaching | Chris Friend assign credentials by saying students passed a course, achieved a goal, or mastered content. Grades also sort or rank students by performance, giving us the ability to discuss “B students” as a group or “above-average” students as a means of exclusion. They label performance based on arbitrary evaluative criteria. I say “arbitrary” because there is really no way to determine what an A means. Even if we look at percentages, the most common means of devising grades, we would be stumped by a simple question: An A is equal to 90% of what? If it’s work done, does that mean that 10% of the work was never attempted, or that 10% failed to meet standards? The inherent vagueness of grades is a self-fueling, all-consuming fire. But what do we tell ourselves grades do? When was the last time you only needed to assess one element of something? Assessment is the process of determining the quality of something, typically a student’s ability, skill, or knowledge. [Photo by riekhavoc (caught up?)