3 Ways to Keep Your Teacher Feedback Strategy Focused.
One-on-One conferences and small groups are awesome opportunities for you to provide teacher feedback as your students try out new reading or writing strategies. Plus, you can welcome feedback about your teaching from them. In other words, student to teacher feedback can be so valuable to your future instruction.
One thing to keep in mind is that feedback doesn’t only have to come from the teacher. I encourage you to create systems that cause students to check in with themselves and with others. Of course, students will need to be taught how to give solid feedback. (Which is no easy thing to do.) But building the habit of seeking feedback from their peers should definitely be one of your goals.
There are 4 really important roles Conferring All-Star Teachers™ play when they confer with students.
Guess what???
Giving strategy focused feedback is one of them.
The other three roles are:
- Teach students how to do their reading or writing work better.
- Nudge students to try it out with your help.
- Link the conference or small group to the student’s ongoing work. This sets the expectation that they will follow through after the meeting is over.
Make Your Teacher Feedback BRIEF.
It is really important to try your best to keep your feedback BRIEF. I love how Jennifer Serravallo puts it in her newest book, Teaching Writing in Small Groups: “The more you talk, the less time and space students have to do the work. Too much teacher talk takes away student agency and can erode their confidence in your belief they can be successful.” Now, we definitely don’t want to do that.
Children won’t always come up with ideas of what they want to say immediately.
Remember according to Zaretta L. Hammond, productive struggle is a good thing. They need time to process and “wrestle” with the strategy a little bit. But we want their productive struggle to NOT become frustrating. So you will need to keep a close eye on your students. Communicate that you believe in them through your body language and words. There will be times when you need to say more, or demonstrate more, or review the steps to the strategy. If you feel it’s needed, please talk more. But if it’s not necessary, saying less is the way to go.
Here’s a teacher feedback example to show you how to keep it BRIEF:
FEEDBACK THAT IS BRIEF: “Reread to see if you can find a punctuation mark that is missing. Point under each word as you read.”
FEEDBACK THAT IS NOT BRIEF: “You want to make sure that all your sentences have a punctuation mark at the end. So go back now through your whole piece and read each sentence. As you do that, see if there are any punctuation marks that are missing. Check to see if there are periods, question marks, or exclamation marks missing. If you’re not sure, you should go ahead and just circle it. You can always come back to it. For now, go back and reread to see what you think about the punctuation marks in your piece. Does that make sense?”
Specific & Relevant Teacher Feedback is Where It's At.
Conferring All-Star Teachers™ aim to make the teacher feedback specific & relevant, aligned to both the goal and strategy(ies) students are practicing during the lesson. And if you don’t know what the goal should be, I recommend taking a look at reading learning progressions. The skills inside this progression builds upon each other. It starts with a foundation skill and slowly gets more and more complex as you move along the progression. You’ll never have to guess what skill to teach next with a reading learning progression.
Now, back to giving teacher feedback that is specific & relevant. Deliver each part, one part at a time, so as not to overwhelm the reader or writer (Hammond, 2015). Providing feedback only on the strategies aligned with the goal of the lesson keeps your teaching focused.
You can use words directly from the strategy in your teacher feedback to students. That way you know for sure that what you are saying to students during the guided practice time, aligns to the strategy you told them at the beginning of the lesson.
Here’s a quick example of SPECIFIC feedback:
FEEDBACK THAT IS SPECIFIC: “In your lead or beginning, use your 5 senses to add more details to the setting.
FEEDBACK THAT IS NOT SPECIFIC: “I think there is more detail that you can add here. What are you going to do?”
Your Teacher Feedback Needs to Be Right On Time.
Last but certainly not least, your feedback needs to be right on time. You will want to provide teacher feedback to students while they are practicing, and offer prompts and questions that course-correct, nudge them along, or point out what they did well (aka compliments to students) in that moment. When you give your feedback in the moment and don’t wait, you can also get feedback from students as they continue to practice. You will begin to notice what they do and don’t understand. Or they will flat out tell you, they just aren’t getting it.
Here’s one last teacher feedback example to show you how to keep it TIMELY:
FEEDBACK THAT IS TIMELY:
“Go back and reread to listen for places where dialogue could go.”
“Right there! I hear a spot where dialogue can go. Did you?”
“Where could dialogue go in the part you just read?”
FEEDBACK THAT IS NOT TIMELY: “You just reread your entire story, and while you were reading, I heard about six or seven places where you could add some dialogue to help your reader picture what the characters are thinking. I’m going to send you back to your seat now to find where those six places are.”
You will make an Even Bigger Impact When Conferring with Your Students If Your Teacher Feedback is Brief, Specific, and Timely.
Who doesn’t want to make an even bigger impact on their students?
You ready to change your students’ reading and writing lives forever? Well, you certainly can when you give all your students strategy focused feedback in every 1-on-1 conference or small group.
There are several other ways to keep your teacher feedback strategy focused. These 3, though, are my favorites. Let me know on Facebook how student teacher feedback is going so far.
Hey, teacher friend!
Don’t forget to grab my FREE Conferring with Readers & Writers Like a Pro guide. You’ll learn the 9-STEPS to meet ALL your students’ needs in 1-on-1 conferences and small groups. And yes, one of those steps is giving strategy focused feedback. But you need the other 8 steps to be on your way to becoming a Conferring All-Star Teacher™.
If you’re looking for even more FREE training, strategies, and tips on teacher feedback; come on over to my Facebook page and the Literacy Teacher Greatness Facebook Community.
And don’t forget to jump on the waitlist for my Conferring All-Star Teacher™ Course. It has the best conferring methods and strategies for any K-8th grade literacy teacher or coach that wants to reach EVERY student, every week. Be the first to know when we open the doors plus get some awesome freebies while you wait.
Have an awesome year, teacher friend!!!
Remember this is the year to grow into your literacy teacher greatness!
