Enhancing the Effectiveness of Teacher Feedback in the Secondary Writing Classroom

1. Enhancing the Effectiveness of Teacher Feedback in the Secondary Writing Classroom Icy Lee

3. Prevalent Practices and Problems

4. Practice I Problem

5. Practice II Problem

6. Practice III Problem

7. Practice IV Problem

8. Practice V Problem

9. Practice VI Problem

10. Practice VII Problem

11. In a nutshell … Something seems radically amiss in teachers’ current feedback practices: • Effective learning is not taking place. • Teachers are exhausted and stressed out. • Students are frustrated and demotivated.

12. Getting to the heart of the matter

13. Missing link between teaching, learning and assessment • Teacher feedback is used for summative rather than formative purposes. • The focus is on testing rather than teaching and learning.

14. Learning-teaching-assessment cycle in the writing classroom • Teaching • Select learning • objectives • Plan learning and • assessment • activities • Assessment • Provide feedback • on student writing • Check / monitor / record • students’ writing • performance against • criteria • Learning • Writing • tasks Formative Assessment

15. To enhance the effectiveness of teacher feedback • Teacher feedback should have a positive washback effect on teaching and learning, allowing teachers to advise students, monitor their learning and fine-tune instruction, and providing opportunities for students to improve their learning. • Teacher feedback should be utilized for formative purposes.

16. Formative nature of teacher feedback • Respond to students’ writing for formative purposes: • Tell students their strengths and what needs to be done in terms of their writing (i.e. areas for improvement) – provide balanced coverage on content, organization and language, etc. • Communicate the information clearly to students – feedback should be made intelligible to students in terms of what they have learnt. • Let students act on teacher feedback – provide students with opportunities to improve their writing based on teacher feedback. • Teach but not just test writing; assess student writing to find out what needs to be learnt and taught.

17. Design a writing programme that integrates process, purpose and content (Hyland, 2003). Develop writing tasks accordingly (e.g. using ‘genre’ as organizing principle). Develop specific assessment criteria for each writing task. Spell out criteria clearly for students. Integrate teaching and assessment - familiarize students with assessment criteria through reading-writing practice activities such as mini-text analysis and text improvement activities. Engage students in peer /self-evaluation. As they apply the criteria, they become better informed about the requirements of good writing (for specific genres). Provide students with a language for discussing their writing. Teaching of writing

18. Assessing writing • Provide balanced coverage on content, structure, organization, language and style. • Respond to writing based on criteria that have been communicated and taught to students, rather than giving decontextualized and ad-hoc responses to errors. • Could use a feedback form that contains specific criteria for the writing task – criteria that have been taught and communicated to the learners. • Need not mark every single student text; some student texts can be subjected to self / peer evaluation.

19. Assessing writing: Treatment of errors • De-emphasize error feedback. • Respond to errors selectively. • Involve learners actively – teachers can’t learn for students; learning can only be done by students themselves. • Encourage students to take greater responsibility for learning – e.g. ask students to track their own errors (e.g. using error logs); negotiate with students on error patterns they want you to respond to. • Treat language errors in follow-up grammar workshops and through peer editing / self-editing. • Strengthen grammar instruction so that feedback is tied in with grammar instruction.

20. Learning of writing • Let students resubmit a draft, giving them an opportunity to act on teacher feedback (thus closing the gaps identified). • If process pedagogy is not used, ask students to write another text on the same genre taught.

21. Bringing together learning, teaching and assessment • Teaching, learning and assessment of writing should be brought together in the learning-teaching-assessment cycle. • How we assess writing cannot be divorced from how we teach writing and how students learn writing.

22. Review your writing instruction and plan a comprehensive writing programme. Formulate feedback policy in the light of writing instruction. Communicate goals and expectations clearly to students, so that they have a more active role to play in the learning-teaching-assessment cycle. Provide students with opportunities to act on teacher feedback; engage them in the learning of writing rather than reduce them to passive testees. Let students take greater responsibility for learning by allowing them to exercise greater control in the formative assessment process. Tips for teachers

23. Implementation • Develop a concrete action plan • Secure support of school leaders • Work with colleagues • Start small • Monitor progress • Evaluate process of change

24. Mark less, but mark better Stop being “composition slaves”!