Feedback to Feed Small Groups

There has been a lot said about the power of small group instruction, but one thing that has come up recently in several educational circles is the power of using small groups to deliver effective feedback.

This got us thinking about how we've seen teachers using small groups in their classrooms to have a big impact on student learning. 

Teachers have pulled groups with similar scores or incorrect answers to conduct targeted review. Writing teachers have pulled groups with similar patterns to deliver feedback collectively, and then teach (or reteach) to support students in making effective revisions.

Using small group time as prime time for feedback not only supports student learning, but also teacher sanity. Certainly it is more efficient to give feedback to 4-5 people at a time, vs. writing painstaking feedback on each piece of work (or meeting 1:1). And if teachers can connect that feedback directly to next steps for instruction, the feedback literally saves instructional time.

And research (i.e. John Hattie's visible learning) would suggest that when small groups are used to give students targeted, timely, and specific feedback (.70 effect size), provide time for deliberate practice (.79 effect size) and thus to build student self-efficacy (.92 effect size), the groups are worth the trouble. 

Planning for Small Group Feedback

Hattie and Yates paper on "Using Feedback to Promote Learning" includes three feedback questions to help guide preparing and delivering effective feedback:

1. What is the goal?
2. What is the progress being made?
3. What is the next step?

In "Feed Students through Feedback," Sandie Novak affirms that feedback is something to be planned for as part of the lesson, and that planning begins with the learning target. Once the teacher and student really know what the goal is, they can begin the process of monitoring and using feedback to adjust progress toward that goal. 

Thus, the teacher can use where students are making progress and what the next step will be to provide targeted feedback and instruction. Likewise, students can use their understanding of the goal to self-assess their progress.

How might this look in your classroom?

Just Escape

Escape rooms aren't new, but they are a game-based learning technique worth dusting off when review threatens to get stale. Kids as young as preschool can find success with these tasks when provided the right modeling and support!

The Benefits

We recently observed a 4th grade teacher using an escape room in math to review place value/rounding. In addition to the benefit of the task being fun and academically engaging, the teacher and students experienced additional academic and SEL benefits. According to the teacher:  

One of the greatest parts about using the [digital] escape rooms is the computer knows the correct answer so the students are provided with direct feedback as to whether their response is correct or incorrect. This allows for me to be able to assist students without having to provide each student in the class with feedback (checking their work immediately).

Students love the challenge of attempting to "escape" and they dive right into each escape room, determined and ready to solve any problem. I typically have them work in partnerships/small groups in order to be able to discuss and share their thinking. Many times, there is quite a bit of dissonance taking place and I absolutely love it. I am consistently telling them to persevere and they own it!

This aligns with the research: in addition to supporting motivation, game-based learning contributes to stronger problem-solving skills, language development, memory, self-esteem, and cooperative work skills.

Planning an Escape

There are many pre-made escapes and templates you can use to build your own escape room, such as those that use Genially or Google forms or Google sites.

But really, before doing any of that (admittedly fun) stuff, be sure you have a clear picture of the skills you want your escape room to test: what is the focus? How will the applications show student mastery of the concepts and skills you have been covering in class?

If an escape room sounds like something you want to do, someone from TLI would love to support you in the planning process, whether it is helping with the template, the plan, or even just connecting you with another teacher who has used an escape room in your content area or grade level.

Game on!

Unburdening the Brain & Shifting the Cognitive Load

There's been A LOT written and talked about recently in regards to "cognitive load"; brain science is showing us more about what does and doesn't work for learning, and the impacts of trauma (like a certain pandemic) and still being felt by our students.

A recent podcast from Truth for Teachers, "Help students do more with less effort using cognitive load theory", explains:

Cognitive load theory includes intrinsic, germane, and extraneous loads. Intrinsic load is the complexity inherent in the content. Instructional designers recognize that most of this load cannot be mitigated. Content load should not be confused with task or assignment load, which are addressed in the next two types.
In germane load, learners are integrating new information into an existing schema. Designers tend to increase this load since it helps ensure learning makes it to long-term memory. Finally, there is extraneous load, which designers seek to eliminate as much as possible. These are the other weights our students carry: distractions (environmental or internal), redundancy of content, and so forth that interfere with deep learning.

(For a more detailed report on what teachers need to know about cognitive load, check this out.) 

What does this mean for us? In short, we want to plan to support the germane load and decrease the extraneous load so that students can spend most of their energy on the intrinsic load. 

What does this look like in class?

If I'm introducing a new competitive review game for some recently taught content, I might not be affecting the intrinsic load because the students should know the content. In fact, frequent, short review games as retrieval practice are good for learning! 

However, by adding a new game and making it competitive, I've potentially increased the extraneous load because of stress AND not taken advantage of the germane load, as students are expending more energy learning something new than perhaps they are on reviewing.

Does this mean we never use a novel approach? Of course not--that would be boring! However, it might mean that I should go with tried and true games FIRST when planning, or that before I use a game like this for content, I introduce it with something fun and low stakes so that students can learn the rules before "it counts." 

In short, the more we rely on routines and solid practices for activating prior knowledge and scaffolding, the more we help our learners focus on learning! 

For more practical tips, this recent Edutopia article also outlines "How to Reduce the Cognitive Load" includes several tips for reducing the extraneous load and supporting the germane load with scaffolds. 

Let us know what stood out for you or what you want to know more about in the comments.

Take Time to Save Time: Learning Targets

Let's begin with a confession: we didn't always care about learning targets. When they were first all the rage, we thought that surely, students didn't care about our learning targets...

Except, that once we started crafting them in student-friendly language, and once we started using them intentionally to plan and communicate the lesson intention to students, the students did care. And we realized we did too.

Students stopped asking "Why do we have to do this?"; closure activities and formative assessment became easier; and work that we didn't realize was more "busy" than valuable began to work itself out of the lessons, leaving more time for high-quality learning experiences. And less time spent planning.

The research is clear: "learning targets" are important to share with students. In the Edutopia article "How to Make Learning Targets Clear to Students," Dr. Michael McDowell shares:

"When students are clear on expectations of learning, they tend to double their rate of learning. Moreover, when students are clear on expectations, they have a better chance of assessing their current performance and using feedback accurately."

The challenge is that just because we write a target on the board, it doesn't mean the expectations are clear to students. So, how do we make our learning targets useful for teachers and students?

1) Plan student-friendly learning targets for the lesson.

The more direct and accessible we make our goal statements, the clearer we are about the intended learning. This can be tricky if we have other underlying goals for our work (i.e. students will practice collaborating, critical thinking, perseverance, etc.). While these are worthy practices, sharing too many goals for the day can be confusing when planning--and when presenting the goals to students.

As you work on this skill, it may help to brainstorm all the goals you can think of for the lesson, and then refer back to the standard(s) of focus for the learning experience when picking the main one or two targets to share with students. 

Make sure that you draft and share the goal in terms that students can (or could, with support) understand. Often when we break things down into terms a child could understand, we understand more fully ourselves!

2) Align your planned activities and assessments with the target.

If you think about the "assessment" you will give to gauge student progress during the lesson, does it align with your learning target? Does it show if students know and/or can do what you want them to? If not, you may need to revisit the target OR the assessment. 

Likewise, before you plan activities, think: do they support students in reaching the learning target? If not, think about how you might replace them with opportunities for students to collaborate, practice, reflect, or revise their thinking to better meet that goal. This can be done with thinking routines like 3-2-1, see-think-wonder, or word-phrase-sentence, which can be used over and over again, or other low-prep practices like brain dumps, summarizing  learning, or making connections in a write-pair-share-revise.

3) Provide time in the lesson for students to make sense of the targets.

Rushing often leads to reteaching! Taking a few minutes at the start of class to have students paraphrase the goals OR make a plan to meet them might save time in the long run. Teachers can check for misunderstandings before students get too far into the process, and students can see where their understandings are incomplete and ask questions before they start. 

Taking a few minutes to reflect on progress at the end of class with a simple "Fist to Five" or an exit ticket reflecting on the goal is easier with a clear target too!

Learning targets = happy classrooms.

By focusing carefully on your goal for the lesson and clearly communicating that goal to students, you save time on planning and on student confusion, leading to less stress and more learning.

For more on how to create learning targets, check out EL's resources.