Your One-Minute Master Class on Effective Feedback
I could tell you that the effect of corrective feedback is dwarfed by the effect of “high information” feedback. I could show you a graph.
But better is to watch this 44-second clip of Liz Clark-Garvey teaching with high-information feedback.
In this clip, Liz has a student who does a thing which students do, which is to confuse the x- and y-coordinates of a point on a graph, thinking the point (0,4) is (4,0).
Many online math learning platforms respond to that very sensible idea not by identifying anything sensible about it, but by offering the corrective feedback that “this is not correct.” Liz Clark-Garvey and her software, meanwhile, offer the student feedback that is rich in information about both the mathematics and also about the value of the student herself.
Open Thread
Talk about whatever, but I’ll be especially interested to learn what you think is the most impactful teacher move or teacher talk in the video. I experience one particular line like a current of electricity every time I watch it.
Transcript
Liz:
Nice, did anyone capture another one? There's two more to go. Which one did you do?
Student:
Zero, four.
Liz:
Zero and four. Oh, interesting. Did that capture a sand dollar?
Student:
No.
Liz:
No. How can we revise this to capture the sand dollar here? 'Cause I think I see the four that [student] sees. Tony, what would you do?
Tony:
The x-axis has to go first, so it's four and zero.
Liz:
Ah, okay, gotcha. But the four and zero,
I see, I saw, I think what [student] saw as well, but it had to flip around.
Okay, we have one, yeah, we have one more sand dollar to capture. What were those coordinates?
Featured Comment
I like to compare the development of one's mind with the development of one's body. If you want real strength in either one, you have to go through training which is extremely challenging. Looking for intellectual shortcuts is like hiring someone to lift weights for you in the gym.
Odds & Ends
¶ RAND: Teacher AI Use Hasn't Budged in a Year. You simply cannot be a regular reader of this newsletter and find these results surprising:
Although AI tools, such as ChatGPT, were first introduced toward the end of 2022, one in four U.S. teachers reported using such tools in the 2023–2024 school year, according to the spring 2024 survey data. However, these data also indicate that teachers’ use of AI tools has not risen much since we last measured it in fall 2023.
Also, RAND defined using AI tools here as a “yes” to the question:
I’ve used AI tools or products for instructional planning or teaching.
Basically, a question about any use in the past tense has been generously converted by RAND into an implication of continuing use in the present tense. I don’t care all that much about this sleight of hand except I think we need a clear understanding of teacher needs and the tools they’re using to meet those needs.
Education Week found similar results in October 2024. At this point, two of the three largest groups researching teacher use of AI have found use that underperforms expectations by a wide margin. The third center, Impact Research, has findings that are so far out of step with their peers (e.g. “49% of teachers using AI chatbots weekly”) that RAND took what is IMO a big step and called them out by name:
Given the stability of our results between fall 2023 and spring 2024, we do not think that the much higher estimates on teachers’ use of AI provided by other surveys (e.g., Impact Research, 2023) are warranted.
¶ Michael Goldstein on what he looks for when he visits a school:
I'd say school equivalent to awesome garlic smell is smile. Some smiles by "median kid" is a proxy for culture, vibe, safety. Are they greeting each other appropriately: kid-kid, kid-teacher? Or are kids swathed in hoods and hiding like Assassin's Creed, eyes on the floor, finding the shadows?
¶ Amanda Perry with a marvelous article on teaching in The Walrus:
I’m not worried that teachers will be replaced en masse by computer programs. A version of that scare already came and went at the post-secondary level, when people were speculating that Massive Open Online Courses would kill the university. Dropout rates for these classes hovered around 90 percent. Like other forms of distance learning, MOOCs have remained a niche element of the educational environment. For too many of us, learning is a social experience, enabled by the structure of a group and the knowledge that an expert is watching you and cares whether you succeed or fail.
Fantastic headline & subhead.
For me, I was struck by the teacher responding "interesting" to the student's incorrect answer and then following up with "I think I see what the student saw."
I see this as respecting the fact that there was intention behind the student's answer, a thinking process which we can see as interesting in and of itself, and then showing that while it might not have been the correct answer, the thinking itself wasn't all that far off target. It's a relatively small adjustment.
I teach writing, but it reminds me of dealing with an issue around what I call "pseudo academic B.S." where students will put on a kind of performance of "intelligence" by using elaborate syntax and elevated vocabulary in their expression, often in ways that muddle the message.
Since writing to audiences is the core of my class experiences, I'll tell students that I think I know why they're doing this - because they believe the audience of a teacher will be impressed - but that we're writing to different audiences with different needs. They're demonstrating one of the core skills (thinking about audience) but are aiming at the wrong target. The shift for students is pretty much instantaneous, and what seemed like a bad habit I'd have to continually correct is simply redirected to the goals of building their writing practice.
Love these videos that make the teaching so visible.
Super impressed with how easily and (apparently) without fear a student both 1) offered up an answer that was wrong, and 2), when asked, "did that capture a sand dollar?" the student - again, apparently without fear or embarrassment - just calmly says, "No." This teacher must've created an incredibly safe and respectful learning environment!