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.
