Teaching Students to Embrace Feedback and Self-Evaluation
5 strategies to improve student performance and save time on your grading in the process
Let’s face it - grading is a drag! It’s an overwhelming time-thief that never completely disappears! This clip from the Canadian sitcom, Mr. D., shows one way frazzled teachers can cope:
OK, just kidding - I would never do this! I deeply believe in the importance of providing feedback; it’s critical to student growth. BUT, providing quality feedback is incredibly time consuming for the teacher!
Teaching students to assess their own progress can help. This too takes a real investment of class time, coaching, and energy, but the outcome is worth it! As students begin to evaluate their own performance against an objective standard, you can begin to trade the role of “grade-assigner” for that of “coach and mentor”. Writing rubrics that are meaningful to students is an important first step in this process, which you can read about in my blog post on Writing Student-Friendly Rubrics. With appropriate, student-friendly rubrics in place, I’ve found these five strategies helpful in helping students become skilled self-evaluators.
Evaluate Sample Student Work Against the Rubric
Regularly have students evaluate example student work against the rubric.
“As students begin to evaluate their own performance against an objective standard, you can begin to trade the role of “grade-assigner” for that of “coach and mentor””
Examples can be written by you, or can be real student work you have curated (removing the names and other identifiers, of course). I typically use a combination of the above, and I’m always looking for examples of common pitfalls to add to my student sample library for use in subsequent school years.
Share samples from across the performance spectrum, and be sure to include examples of common errors or pitfalls you currently see in your students’ work.
Provide one example and ask students what grade they would give it. As students discuss in small groups and then in the full class, keep reminding them to go back to the rubric to justify their decisions.
Alternatively, give students several different example assignments and ask them to organize the work from best to worst. Again, remind students continually to justify their thinking based on the rubric.
After examining sample work, have students reflect on these prompts:
My project is most like Example #___ because….
One thing I’m going to do to improve my project is….
This exercise will be more effective if you repeat it several times throughout the project with multiple student samples; this reinforces the value of the rubric and helps students develop skill in evaluating work against it.
Self-Evaluation
On the day a project is due, I pass out a blank rubric and ask students to score their own work and provide a brief explanation for their ratings. Students attach this page to the front of their project; when I grade it, I will look at their self-evaluation first. If I agree, that will be their grade! If not, I will explain why - again based on the rubric.
I find looking at kids’ self-evaluations makes my grading go much faster; once students become skilled at using rubrics, I often only write “I agree” or make very brief comments on students’ own reflection. Interestingly, I find students are often harder on themselves than I am, and I have the pleasure of awarding a better score than the student expected! Other times, students admit on this self-evaluation piece that they didn’t really meet project expectations; this eliminates a lot of the long drawn-out feedback I used to write. This practice has deepened my feedback and greatly decreased the time I spend grading!
Retakes and Grade Improvement
If students are unhappy with their grade, we again go back to the rubric. I ask students to annotate their original work, showing specific changes they plan to make to improve it. This must be justified against the rubric. Once we have discussed the proposed changes, the student may submit together the old assignment, the old rubric, the revised assignment, and a newly completed rubric and reflection. Not all students are willing to complete this process, but it is always available. Guiding students through this process leads to real improvement, along with reinforcement of the skills of evaluating one’s own work against the objective standard.
Grading Writing
Students need lots of practice writing, but grading writing takes forever. In world language classes, while I focus on usage, I do want kids to learn to edit their writing for accuracy. Kids tend to make the same sorts of grammatical mistakes over and over. After writing “gender agreement” or “wrong conjugation” for the 5,000th time, my amazing colleague, German teacher David Lovin shared a tip that changed my practice: Develop a common shorthand for these errors.
I listed out the most common errors I see in students’ writing, along with a shorthand code for each.
“If the student is not making a few mistakes they’re probably being too cautious with their expression.”
SV = subject / verb agreement
VT = wrong verb tense
C = wrong conjugation
SP = spelling
G = gender agreement
F = sentence fragment
WC = word choice
I had students write these codes inside the front cover of their writing notebooks and posted them around the room. Now when I see these errors in written work, I just note the shorthand above that word.
A few cautions and suggestions about this technique:
You don’t have to grade everything students write. I like to have my upper-level students write about three times per week on journal prompts, and then every two weeks or so, choose their best journal entry to revise and submit for a grade.
You don’t need to note EVERY error students make in the target language! Mark enough to challenge the student and move them forward, but not so many as to be frustrating.
Hold students accountable for structures you are working on in class.
Ideas are more important than grammatical accuracy. If the student is not making a few mistakes they’re probably being too cautious with their expression. Work with kids to view mistakes as steps toward learning.
Along those lines, It’s important to give kids an opportunity to correct and improve their written work. This DOES result in more grading, but once you get good at the shorthand, it actually goes pretty quickly and helps students embrace the idea of constantly improving.
Having kids understand their mistakes, correct them, and rewrite their assignments is a very powerful tool for growth
Have Students Develop the Rubric
“Developing the rubric becomes a metacognitive activity in which students develop deeper awareness of their own learning processes.”
Yes, you read that right! Working with students to develop a collaborative rubric takes time, but I’ve found it to be extremely effective in helping students evaluate their own work, and it creates ownership and gives students agency to boot! I mainly use this with my upper levels and with a rubric we’ll use several times. Of course, I do guide students to include key instructional components in the rubric, and we work to make the language specific and meaningful to the kids. Often kids have quite a debate about which aspects of speaking are important to include and which are optional. Thus, developing the rubric becomes a metacognitive activity in which students develop deeper awareness of their own learning processes. Read more about this strategy in my blog post, Student-Written Speaking Rubrics
Through the year, we evaluate all speaking assignments on this class-created rubric. Students believe in the rubric; it is an articulation of their own goals for the course. As a result, they work hard to achieve each rubric point, resulting in tremendous growth in their speaking!
Deepening students’ ability to evaluate their own work and to truly incorporate your feedback is an investment not only in your course content, but in the students’ overall academic development. How have you helped students develop these skills? Share in the comments!
