Creating a Classroom Culture of Feedback & Revision
Hello, dear reader! My name is Ollie Harris and I teach (mostly) social studies at MG21, a small liberal arts charter school within Monona Grove School District, though our classes are multi-disciplinary so I end up teaching a lot of courses that are part social studies, and part math, english, or science. I have a passion for student-centered classrooms and ensuring equitable access to content, which drives a lot of my curriculum development and teacher moves in the classroom. MG21 is a very close knit community of learners, which I am so happy to have been a part of for the last two years (also known as my entire teaching career thus far) and plan on staying for many years to come as I continue to work with the whole staff on building a cross campus writing curriculum, which is how I came to know the Greater Madison Writing Project.
When I first was posed with the opportunity to do this Teachers Workshop I was in the midst of grading essays written by students in my Know Your Rights class, and through this process, I had watched students delete comments in Google Docs as I sent them in. I found this infuriating, because of course it was, I was working hard on this feedback only for them to figuratively throw it away. I would stew at my desk, thinking: Is it my fault? Is my feedback bad? Are they just not ready to accept the feedback? Whatever was going through their heads, it became clear to me that there was a barrier there, there was an issue I could attempt to resolve, and if there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s this: I love puzzles.
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When you first type “feedback in the classroom” into Google there are an overwhelming amount of resources that pop up onto your screen. And, at one point I just had to pick some books that seemed promising and hoped that they would turn out for me, thankfully Google was kind. Specifically, I learned a lot from teachers and their research like Starr Sackstein’s Peer Feedback in the Classroom, Matthew Johnson’s Flash Feedback, and Susan Brookhart’s How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students. These three educators are not only practiced practitioners of giving effective feedback in their classrooms, but they are also activists for student-directed classrooms and curriculum. Oh how it feels to be seen! I came away from this research realizing that, yes, part of feedback is about how you as the teacher give feedback, but perhaps the more important part, is how you create a classroom environment where feedback is not only welcomed and encouraged, but expected by students–where it’s a part of the culture. My plan (or rather hope) is that I can cultivate this culture of feedback and revision in my classroom, that students can expect feedback and then know what to do with it. This will not just sprout up out of nothing and will in fact take a lot of forethought on my part, but I’ve never backed away from a challenge.
Through my research, I came to the realization that my initial frustration with revision and students accepting feedback was likely because students didn’t know how to revise. I thought about my high school experience: Did anyone teach me how to revise? I came to the conclusion that students either didn’t have the strategies, hadn’t had someone model revision, or did not understand the rubric in the first place. So my plan is to remove the barriers. I want to teach, explicitly, about what the standards are that I’m grading them on: What does tone mean, what does it mean to write to an audience? I want to conference on polished writing projects with students where they take notes and return to those notes time and again. I have plans to model how to take feedback and how to implement revision strategies into one’s own work. I want to show them that the writing process is never really over, and also that no writer is perfect. My intention with all of this is to increase student engagement and accountability, but also to ensure that everyone has equitable access to the skills necessary to be successful in my classroom.
I have always been a teacher focused strongly on equity and students in front of me, that’s why I’m a teacher, as I’m sure that was the journey for many of you as well. Sometimes, a lot of times, I find myself getting lost in the dark; of feeling like I’ll never be good enough, in wondering if my students are learning the right or correct amount of information in my classroom, that I’m not preparing them for what comes after. This research has reminded me that I have the ability to grow my own practice: I saw a problem and I wanted to know how I could try to fix it, so I found the books and I did the research (not that I think I now have the equation for world peace, I’m taking it one step at a time). There will always be issues that arise in the classroom, teaching will always be a fraught profession, remember that you have the power and ability to make that important change in your classroom; so try something new, maybe something crazy and out of the box. Your students may love it, they may hate it, but hey, we all make mistakes sometimes, and our students need to see us do that every now and then.
