Blog 7: Feedback and track of progress

Hello everyone ✌

For this new entry, I will reflect on one of the most important steps when assessing the performance of a student: the feedback and tracking of students’ progression during class. First, I will write about what feedback is and its role when tracking the progress of students. Then, I will describe how my team teacher tracks the progress of students and gives them feedback. Finally, I will reflect on the importance of giving meaningful and appropriate feedback for students to keep their progress throughout the development of the course.

The guiding questions for this entry are:

How does the teacher collect evidence on students' performance?

How is feedback performed in class?

Feedback and tracking students progression:

Feedback can be defined as the return of helpful information or criticism to someone as a result of their performance on a task or activity. In the area of English teaching, feedback is an essential part of the learning process, as it helps students acknowledge their strengths and weaknesses in a specific area or skill they are learning. It gives students crucial information on how their progress is seen and evaluated, allowing them to continue progressing to achieve the final goal of the course.

Feedback is not just a matter of saying what you saw, but it involves important steps to follow so students can understand what they are being evaluated on, how they are being evaluated, and how to interpret the results. First, the teacher needs to provide specific criteria for students to understand the communicative and linguistic requirements of the task. Second, there has to be a tool for evaluating (SWOT, TAG, OREO, Checklist, Exit ticket), and the tool needs to be both useful for teachers and easy to understand for students. Third, it is important to take into account what type of feedback the student and teacher need, as there are different variations (peer assessment, self-assessment, group discussion, teacher assessment). Finally, the most important part is the action plan. Students need to be provided with a possible route to follow so they can improve and overcome their weaknesses for future evaluations. At the CCA, some strategies to give feedback include OREO (Opinion, Reason, Evidence, Opinion), TAG (Talk about something you like, Ask a question, and Give a suggestion), and Exit tickets. In the end, it comes down to the teacher choosing what kind of feedback is the most suitable for the purposes of the course and for fostering students’ improvement.

How does my Team teacher give feedback and track the students' progrestion in class?

Feedback plays an important role in both of my courses, and my team teacher is constantly giving feedback to students in different ways. In previous classes, she used TAG, Exit tickets, and peer assessment, and always provided clear criteria so students were aware of what they were being evaluated on. For example, in TB1 1.1, during the free practice communication activity, the teacher asked students to talk in pairs about an event in their lives. She gave specific criteria for students to prepare and carry out the activity. Although it was a free practice and the teacher was not meant to overcorrect students, at the end of the activity she reviewed the criteria and asked students if they had followed it or not. Besides this, she also did another activity in which students created their own timeline and had to present it to other students using specific criteria. Finally, the teacher gave students an action plan at the end of the class to practice the grammar topic of the day: need to and be allowed to.

       

In the case of TB1 1.3, the teacher was also clear with her feedback and criteria when assessing students’ activities. For example, in the semi-controlled practice, she asked students to create predictions using the structure If I + present simple … I will + complement. The teacher evaluated whether students used this structure correctly when talking about predictions. At the end of the class, she used an Exit ticket as a form of self-evaluation of students’ understanding of the lesson, using emojis and asking them to give reasons for how they felt. Finally, as in TB1 1.1, the teacher created an action plan for students to practice the grammar topic of the course: the first conditional.

What about me?

In my case, in the last class I worked on some assessment activities for the teachers’ tasks. One example of the assessment activities I planned was a checklist for TB1 1.3 in the written project input. I planned a peer assessment in which students would evaluate their classmates’ school profiles based on each input given up to that moment. Likewise, the checklist included a section where students had to mention one thing they liked and one thing their peer could improve. I believe this assessment rubric fulfills all the requirements to be considered a good feedback tool for students. It provides clear criteria, is likely appealing to students, asks them to provide examples and check their delivery, and offers possible ways of giving feedback through functional phrases.

Reflection:

Feedback is an essential part of the learning process for students. It allows them to understand how they are being evaluated and what the expected outcome is when they complete an activity. Likewise, it helps students recognize where they are and what skills they can still improve. Finally, feedback is not just about telling students what they are good or bad at. It is about allowing them to be part of their own learning process by giving them specific criteria for evaluation and crucial information about their progress so they don’t feel lost or alone in their learning journey.