For nearly five years, this bulletin board has been in the front of my classroom. I put up what I believed to be the unsourced quotation as more of a reminder to myself than my students, but certainly to encourage them to actively participate in the learning process and not just be a bystander to it.
The first couple of years I referred to the quotation often in class. I would model working through a problem or a text and then I would remind students this was what learning looked, felt and sounded like and I would encourage them to do similar work to promote their own learning.
This past week, I was reading further into Ken O’Connell’s book, How to Grade for Learning, when I stumbled upon this same quote, attributed to Terry Doyle. In this context, however, the emphasis was on involving students in the work of using specified and cooperatively-determined criteria to self-assess and to help each other to assess their work. All these years, I had been trying to involve students in the work involved with learning tasks, but not in the whole process of learning, including the metacognitive practices of self-reflecting on learning.
I have struggled for years to make the self- and peer-revision process meaningful to my students, but it never turned out to be much more than a weak exchange of trite and vague compliments. “I really like your story.” “You did a good job with the characters.” If I involve students in the actual work of providing feedback – if I explicitly teach them how to use the predetermined criteria that we developed together to guide their responses to their own work as well as that of others, I can surely take their work and therefore their learning to an entirely new level. In addition, while it is hard for a student to diminish the impact of teacher feedback, putting my words alongside their own and those of their peers further adds to the bank of encouragement and support as well as providing multiple perspectives on ways to grow and improve.
While the end of the year often prompts ideas for changes and improvements in my classroom and instruction, this bulletin board will surely remain, but with new perspective and emphasis. The one doing the work is certainly the one doing the learning,” but moving beyond just completing assignments and practice work, teaching and including my students in the work of providing meaningful feedback is a life skill I am happy to promote!
Teaching at 3am 