I teach a college composition course. We spend much time in peer reviewing (probably 70% of class time) in a formative assessment process. Today the students had their 6th peer review on the same “essay” and we are just up to doing three body paragraphs. I asked my students to do a questionnaire on the process we use. About 15% said that they did not peer review in their high school English classes. Of those they did peer review, they stated that peer review focused on grammar, spelling and punctuation. As one student said of our process, “we focus on changing idea.” Most students (80%) had not had more than one peer review their writing; so far we have had 6 different peers react to their writing. As one student mentioned “you get a different view and different aspects about your paper from other people ” and “You receive others’ opinions using the same format you used to write it.” My goal is simple: for students to constantly improve in their writing. Formative assessment which focuses on monitoring and giving feedback continually through the process enables students to improve in each aspect of their writing, starting at the pre-writing phase. A more thorough description of this process is found in my Successful Student Writing Through Formative Assessment
How often do your students peer review each other’s work?
My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Your Students, is available through Eye on Education.
Also, my book, Successful Student Writing Through Formative Assessment, is available through Eye on Education.
Teacher Portfolios- Real Student Success or Faked Success?
Published March 26, 2009 Academic , Accountability , Achievement , Administrator , Assess , Assessment , Comment , Content , Data , Eportfolio , Evaluate , Portfolio , Proficient , Teacher 2 CommentsTags: Accountability, Achievement, Data, examples, Feedback, Portfolio, Proficient, Student, student work, Success, Teacher, work
Individually, I talked to two teachers who had to present teacher portfolios and had received back comments on their portfolio. One teacher had glowing feedback. He told me how he had only put student material in the portfolio that demonstrated above proficient work. He explained that usually only one or two students in all of his classes had reached that level for each standard and so he included that work.
The other teacher had put in student work at all levels of proficiency. Her feedback focused on how she had to help students to be successful. She had included the percent of students at each level of proficiency; she had even included a graph for the proficiency rates on the four major standards. She indicated some strategies she had tried and whether each strategy succeed or did not succeed with these students.
The administrators were looking for measures of the teachers’ success in helping students to learn. They did not discern the difference between a staged or fake representation of success for a teacher and a teacher’s full disclosure about classroom learning.
How can your teacher portfolio show your growing success in reaching more and more students?
My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students, is available through Eye-on-Education.