Saturday, November 1, 2014

First VALOR Observations and Descriptive Feedback

On Monday of this week, four of my peers plus one learning liaison descended on my class with the directive to look at specific things I was doing. This is much more in-depth than the 45 minutes the principal spends in my room for PDAS purposes.  So, yeah, I was a bit nervous to be under that level of scrutiny.  But I asked for it, right?

What I found from their observations is that I have a real problem with giving descriptive feedback. I think my biggest issue in grappling with that concept is how to do it when my subject is pretty cut and dried. If I ask a student how to find the force of gravity on Callisto, then they are either right or wrong.  Right?

Or, I can tell them, “You set that up correctly, but forgot to square the radius.”

If I tell them, “Well, you wrote that wrong answer really neatly,” then they are going to give me the ‘you’re a crazy lady’ look.  High school students have their condescension meters set pretty sensitive.

When I sat down with @LNormTeach to go over the observations, I realized that I’m so focused on finding out what my students are thinking that I’ve totally overlooked the inverse function – I haven’t tried to let them know what I’m thinking.


So I’m throwing this out to the Silver cohort . . . Help me figure out how to incorporate descriptive feedback into my classroom structure and practice.

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