Month: February 2019

The lecture long dominated the classroom. The concept behind it was simple. Teachers have information and students don’t. So the teachers give information to the students, who have the choice to absorb the information or not.

These days we understand that there are often better approaches than to just throw information at students. We know that students usually learn best when a class revisits key ideas, skills, and content multiple times in multiple different ways.

The one common glaring exception to this trend away from here-is-the-information-do-what-you-want pedagogy and towards deeper, more recursive practice in our classes? The feedback we give.

Continue reading “Want to Significantly Improve Your Feedback to Students? Stop Giving It in Isolation” →

Grading and feedback are often conflated. For nearly a decade I used the term “grading” as a synonym for nearly any type of response to writing without so much as flinching, but I know now that they are actually very different and in some ways opposing activities.

Grades are where we rank students by placing them into boxes. At its core, the goal of grades is essentially to divide the “winners” from the “losers.”

Feedback, on the other hand, is the information we give to writers to help them rise to the next level. At its core, the goal of feedback is make everyone a winner.

Continue reading “Why We Should Separate Grades and Feedback” →

This last semester I unwittingly began what has turned out to be a rather surprising pedagogical experiment. In short, over my career I have generally tried to keep my teaching and my writing about teaching lives separate. The reasoning behind this was pretty simple. I assumed that my students would have little interest in learning how the sausage that turns into a class is made, and if I’m being honest, I was a bit self-conscious about students seeing my written work, lest they judge me.

Continue reading “Why We Should Let Students In On Our Pedagogy” →