Scaffolding, Assessments to Inform Planning, and Providing Useful Feedback Kids can Understand

Program Standard:

Assessment

6.3 Designing Student Assessments to Inform Planning

6.4 Using Assessment to Provide Feedback to Students

Interpretation:

6.3: Teachers need to design assessments so that the assessments can be used to determine what should be taught next, and how.

6.4: Teachers need to provide useful, timely feedback to students so that kids can improve on or before the next assignment.

Evidence:

In my class, we worked on an assignment that involved students developing questions about a reading, swapping questions with a fellow student, and then attempting to answer that fellow student’s questions. I designed the assignment to serve as a formative assessment to inform my planning, because I wanted to assess what students’ question-writing and answering abilities were. I somewhat scaffolded the assignment by providing sentence-starters for the questions.

According to an Edutopia blog seeking to provide educators with useful resources, “Scaffolding is breaking up the learning into chunks and then providing a tool, or structure, with each chunk” (Alber, 2011). Scaffolding is a useful tool to help struggling students understand and complete difficult or complex assignments. But I am not convinced, after this lesson, that I scaffolded adequately.

I then provided feedback on the students’ work so that they could improve or move on before a future assignment, which was supposed to build on question-design and question-answering. I learned from this that sometimes, even when you think you’ve adequately scaffolded something, it’s not enough for all the students. Of course, that’s the whole point of feedback – to help students understand where they went wrong, so that they can do better next time. And scaffolding is meant as a guide, not to guarantee perfection.

Feedback is tricky, though, because it’s predicated on the assumption that students actually read what the teacher wrote. And often the students who struggle the most don’t read the feedback, or don’t internalize it. I realize now that I need a way to get kids feedback that they understand and then proceed to use in order to improve.

Sample of student work from this assignment:

Summary:

Students need practice with new styles of assignments, and they need feedback to improve. But that feedback has to be accessible to them, and it has to be feedback they’ll actually pay attention to.

Next Steps:

·       Scaffold more thoroughly, and consider providing at least one or two starter questions that all students must answer first, before proceeding with the activity described in my lesson above.

·       Provide student feedback that MUST be paid attention to. This might mean meeting with some or all students individually, in order to ensure that the student hears and understands their feedback, so that they can do better moving forward.

·       Some students invariably need more help and support than others. For the students who are desperately struggling, consider allowing them to work as pairs or with additional supports like worksheets, in order to help them catch up.

References:

Alber, Rebecca. (2011). Six Scaffolding Strategies to Use With Your Students. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/scaffolding-lessons-six-strategies-rebecca-alber