Professional Development - page 5

As teachers, we don’t always have the time to go through everything that our students have produced – it’s also not always necessary. We want to get our students to the point where they can review their own work for strengths and weaknesses. So, how can we get there?

Three types of feedback

Feedback comes from one of the three Ps: professional, peer and personal. Professional feedback is from course tutors and anyone who could be considered the so-called expert. Students value this most because they feel that only the person who has been trained in this field has the knowledge and more crucially, the authority and expertise to review and comment on their work.

Peer feedback is difficult and often associated with negative feedback from fellow students. We need to encourage an atmosphere of collaborative learning and establish the goals of peer feedback. Just as professionals and experts have others review their work, our students can review each other’s work for strengths and weaknesses. When executed properly, peer feedback or assessment, can help students improve and recognise their own mistakes or weaknesses.

Reviewing one’s own work, giving personal feedback, is challenging for many students. Students are either too critical of their work or they see nothing wrong with what they have produced and are quite happy with their product.

Effective feedback

Giving effective feedback needs to be taught (and learnt). You cannot just have your students exchange essays and tell them to give their partner some feedback. They may not know what they should be looking for. Students may pick out unimportant aspects. They may also read the essay and summarise their feedback with a comment like, ‘That was nice.’ Or ‘I liked it’. Such statements don’t say very much about the work itself.

Here are some ideas on how to improve the quality of feedback from peer reviews and self-assessment.

Tip 1: Use rubrics to focus

Train students to give feedback and self-assess by providing guidelines on what to look out for. As with standardised exams, you can create rubrics which show students what they should be looking out for in a piece of work. Rubrics can be used for both spoken and written work and when designed well, should make the review process smoother. There are three types of rubrics.

Holistic rubrics can help evaluate the overall quality of a piece of work and can be used with any type of work a student has produced. Use it to assess role plays, podcasts, and even shorter pieces of writing. It’s not difficult to design, and easy to use. As a starting point, decide on how many levels of performance you want. Then write the descriptors for the best and worst level of performance. After that, write the descriptors for the levels in between.

Here’s an example rubric used to assess 10-minute videos created by students.

If such a rubric is a little too general for you, or if you think your students need more guidance on what to look out for, why not try an analytic rubric?

The advantage of this rubric is that it is strongly aligned to your learning objectives. The rubric focuses on different performance criteria and enables students to identify strengths and weaknesses in a piece of work. To create this type of rubric, decide what learning objectives should be demonstrated in the work, and then write your descriptors for the best and worst level of performance before writing the descriptors for the levels in between.

The following rubric assesses introductory paragraphs for an argumentative essay.

Another good rubric is one that focuses only on what students are expected to know and demonstrate in their work. Less time-consuming to create, you can use this rubric in self-assessment and also easily adopt it for peer review.

The following rubric was used to assess student podcasts. Three learning objectives were assessed here: the opening or introduction of the podcast, the content, and the delivery. The rubric identifies the minimum standard for each of these learning objects and reviewers would make their own observations in the columns on either side.

You can create your own rubric or use a ready-made one (just note that you might have to adapt the latter to suit your specific purpose). Here are some rubric banks for you to browse:

• Rcampus
• University of Hawai’i at Manoa
• Santa Clara University

Tip 2: Personalize your feedback with the P-Q-P formula

Holistic and analytic rubrics don’t offer much room for personal comments. Use the P-Q-P formula with the rubric, or even on its own to encourage students to really think about what they’re reviewing. This formula works with both peer review and self-assessment.

P-Q-P stands for praise, question, and polish. Have students look at the piece of work and identify something that is worthy of praise, something that stands out or was done well. ‘Question’ requires the reviewer to pose a question (or more) about anything related to that piece of work. It could be content-related, language-related, or even process-related. In the last step, reviewers make suggestions on how the work can be improved., i.e. how to polish it up.

Tip 3: Feed forward and feed up

Have you ever noticed how feedback only looks back on a piece of work? Comments such as ‘You didn’t have a strong thesis statement’ or ‘The email had too many spelling errors’ tell our students what was wrong with their work. However, they do not necessarily tell them how to do better. While it can be argued that comments like the previous would imply that this is an area that needs work, the main message is still: ‘This is not good.’

Consider how you word your feedback and try to make your comments feed forward and feed up. When you feed forward, you’re telling your students what it takes to do better next time. Instead of ‘The email had too many spelling errors’, try ‘Check your work for spelling mistakes before submitting; there were quite a number of errors here.’

In feed up, make the link between what your students have produced, and why their real-world language needs to be clearer. With the example of the thesis statement, you could clarify your feedback as follows: ‘It’s important to know how to write a good, strong thesis statement because you’ll be doing a lot of that when you write term papers in graduate school.’

Conclusion

Feedback shouldn’t only come from you. While getting students to do peer-review and self-assessment may seem like something lazy teachers would do, the actual goal of this independence. Students need to be able to review their own work and those of their peers. When they leave your course, they won’t have you to give them feedback on their every move. And, move up and forward – feedback is important but so is feeding up and feeding forward!

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If you find this article useful, you may also be interested in coaching principles for the ESL classroom.

Teaching materials mostly focus on grammar and lexis – but often seem to fail to paint a realistic, inclusive picture of our social landscapes. Tyson Seburn explains why minority representation matters and how English teachers can bring diversity into their classrooms.

I am staring at a blank page. I should be writing materials for B1 learners, but I’m still staring – I know the target language and I know the types of activities I’m expected to incorporate. Still, I have questions, ones that other writers and teachers may only briefly consider, if at all.

• How will the content help all the learners feel they belong to this learning experience?
• What will my choices of content convey about what and who is valued?

Answers to these two questions can significantly impact how learners feel about the materials and more importantly, about themselves.

Language learning is most effective when the language and activities are relevant to the learners using them. The narratives (i.e. texts, audio, visuals) in our materials are not only vehicles for modeling target language; they collectively paint a picture of what people are worthy of being included and which experiences are valued.

Choosing relatable content

Let’s use a snapshot of a lesson to demonstrate. Take a coursebook unit that focuses on polite requests. Throughout the unit, there are the usual four skills, grammar, and pronunciation activities. One unit situation included is applying for a mortgage, where that target language will be used.

We see a couple sitting at a desk, one holding a pen about to sign a document while the other looks on with anticipation. Across the desk is a person in a jacket, who most likely is the mortgage specialist. There is a short text at the top of the page setting the scene and an audio dialogue with gap-fill under the image.

One set of questions we may ask ourselves when looking at these pages is about situational relevance. What if our learners aren’t likely to apply for a mortgage? What if there’s a different process in our context for buying a house than the way it’s presented here?

It can be easy for our learners to disconnect from materials when they don’t see themselves in them.

Yes, the grammar, the lexical set, and the functional language is probably real, but for your learners, is this context and this use of the language irrelevant? Surely we would adapt or skip this part of the unit altogether.

Ultimately, it can be easy for our learners to disconnect from materials when they don’t see themselves in them. For these reasons, it is our responsibility to do our best to create and give access to learning materials that support our learners’ needs. However, this also includes narratives.

Narrative biases – who do you think does what?

Then, another set of considerations we should make concerns the narratives themselves, assuming the situation itself is not the problem. When you pictured the unit as you read about the bank loan for a mortgage situation above:

Who were the couple that came to mind?

What:

• do they look like?
• are they wearing?
• are their names?

What does the mortgage specialist look like?

What:

• bank are they at and what does it look like?
• kind of information set the scene in the text?
• did the couple and mortgage specialist say to each other in the dialogue, how do they sound?

Your answers to these questions can be interesting to think about.

So who does what then?

Let’s examine a sample narrative for this unit, including a preview text, a visual, and dialogue.

TEXT – relevant vocabulary, target language

Somchai and Lucas are first-time homeowners, at least they want to be. They are applying for a mortgage. Today, they are at Deutsche Bank to discuss terms with a mortgage specialist, Emilia. If all goes well, they will probably sign the mortgage application.

AUDIO

Somchai: Hi Emilia. We’ve looked over the application and we’d like to discuss the interest rate on the mortgage. Would it be possible to lower it in any way? 2,0% is a little high for us.

Emilia: OK, let me see what I can do. Ahh yes, the interest rate for a 10-year term is lower than 20 years. However, the shorter term disqualifies you from the first-time homeowner bonus. Do you think that this option might suit you better?

Lucas: I think we should weigh these options first. Do you mind if we talk privately for a few minutes?
Emilia: No, of course not. I’ll come back in 10 minutes.

Inclusion and belonging – diversity as the new normal

When you compare the total sample narrative with the one you imagined at first, there are likely to be differences. It can be helpful to cycle back to the two questions we began with:

• How will the content help all the learners feel they belong to this learning experience?
• What will my choices of content convey about what and who is valued?

When we answer these questions, learner identities play an important role for relevance. However, the situation and language context matter just as much. If we represent certain identities as stereotypes or erase them completely from the materials we use, how can learners feel connected to, invested in, or valued by them?

Therefore, it’s best to normalize diversity by showing people in relatable contexts (such as planning a vacation, visiting a restaurant or some other everyday situation) without highlighting their perceived “otherness”.

Stick it on your fridge: Inclusion 101

To promote inclusion and belonging in our practice, I have a few maxims on post-it notes near me:

• Do the work. Before you try to improve anything, read stories by underrepresented individuals. Watch videos from minority voices. Listen to podcasts about race, queerness, and disability that centre these experiences.
• Reality has variety. Let go of any preconceived notions of what X people are. One of the best ways to avoid reducing a group of people into one version is to increase the opportunity they appear in our materials. For instance, more than one LGBTQ narrative means we can showcase more individuality.
• Nothing is always centred. Place focus away from a perceived default where possible. For example, English (and perceptions of culture) is centred in our lessons by default. It doesn’t need more help or power. Take the opportunity where natural to localise names, places, experiences, and even use L1.

For a more in-depth exploration of inclusive practice, see my new book, How to Write Inclusive Materials (2021).

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If you enjoyed this article, you may also be interested in our interviews with LGBTeachers!