The Importance of Teacher and Peer Feedback during Remote Learning

I believe that we all know that giving feedback to students can be the bulk of the workload. Is the payoff worth the immense effort and time? In Visible Learning, John Hattie noted that feedback is “one of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement”, so if you’d like to increase student achievement in your classroom, feedback can be the key to making it happen.

Blog commenting is a great and powerful teaching and learning tool which cannot be disregarded. Reflecting on my own experience,  I believe that online feedback helped promote good communication and build stronger positive relationships within our Room 5's classroom community.  Blogging and commenting provides authentic experiences to purposefully utilize students' reading and writing skills. I always encourage my learners to check out their peers' blogs, give, receive and respond to feedback. 

My 2020 lockdown experiences proved that promoting peer blog commenting helps connect students with their friends, teachers and wider communities. Moreover, according to research, through exposure to a multitude of opinions and through awareness of writing for a wider audience, blogs also foster cognitive engagement and critical thinking because learners need to reflect on the possible reactions of others to their postings.

Examples of my Y2-3 learners' comments: 

Home Learning Round 2

Here we go again... Home Learning round 2! Level 3 caught us in the middle of our exciting LCS Book Week project! The children were disappointed as they were so keen to write a script and perform their new play! I know that some of them continued working on the script during the first days of Level 3. It clearly shows their engagement and genuine interest in their learning.

I'm grateful to our school management as they decided to distribute free loan devices to our Year 2-3 students. It definitely reflected in an increased number of children that I've been seeing online during our Google Meets or working on their learning programmes. Out of 20 children in my Y2-3 class, I normally see 12-14 students twice a day and 18 are actively busy working on their programmes. What a success!

This sudden change in learning environment made me stop and rethink my professional inquiry again. After some consideration, I am determined to continue with my focus on promoting deep learning that requires students to develop cognitive engagement and critical thinking across the curriculum using Learn-Create-Share.

When designing my lessons, I try to ensure that activities are personally meaningful for my students. Last week, we focused on making inferences and sharing our experiences. I believe it helped connect the online learning tasks with students' previous knowledge and experiences in personally relevant ways.

During our google meets I usually focus on questions that encourage deeper reflection and personal responses from my learners and stimulate real, authentic conversations, for example: 'Why do Zebras have stripes?' or ' Are dolphins smart? Why?' I also use these conversations to develop active use of specific vocabulary, collaborative and questioning skills and foster their confidence and curiosity. 

It is so rewarding to see that my students initiate authentic conversations by sharing their topics of interest. They ask questions and give feedback to each other and even plan for the next activities that we could do together during the home learning period.

Examples of student-driven collaborative activities:

- Creating our class digital library (students created read-aloud).

- Creating and playing Kahoots of their interest (rugby, Te Reo, maths, rhymes and alliterations, etc)

- Blogging. Sharing their personal presentations like cooking,  dances and songs, art, stories etc)

- Commenting on each other blogs leaving smart and specific comments.

Learning, Creating and Sharing - week 2

During the week following our first collaborative session, we continued to talk about our favourite books. One of my inquiry focuses is on making students' learning experiences authentic by designing LCS projects based on their interests and taking into account their identities. During this project, we put students' interests at the centre of their learning and I believe this approach inspired our young learners to create many wonderful written texts, art and digital objects.

Reflecting on our class identities, It was very interesting to observe how different classes focused on different aspects of LCS. One of the classes discussed the story elements and created their own characters and settings in response to the book they'd selected. I believe they now aim for rewriting the 'model text' and creating their own book! The students started to work on some illustrations. How exciting was to see such creative writers and artists! 

Another class focused on descriptive writing, unpacked new vocabulary and dug even deeper talking about characters' feelings in the book. The students presented their descriptions to the audience and received well-deserved Pakipaki!

My class decided to use one of the famous book characters and completely change the settings of the story! We brainstormed a lot of problems and solutions, wrote a number of short plays, acted them out and performed to the other classes last Friday. I promote the use of drama techniques to support literacy learning. I believe it makes reading and writing activities more engaging and meaningful for students,  enhances critical and creative thinking skills, thus I hope it will help my students to formulate and express ideas and opinions. 

Our Y2-3 students were highly engaged and motivated. They were proud to present what they had created and tried their best sharing authentic learning experiences. Our next step is to do some blog posts sharing our project with a wider audience and connecting our learners online.  Teachers will plan for shared writing lessons to write smart comments on the other class blogs and then allow our students to leave more smart positive personal comments.

Year 2-3 Collaborative Learn-Create-Share Book Week project

My personal goals:

Engage and collaborate with my team by involving them in the cross-curricular LCS project from the planning stage to the celebration of the school Book Day in 3 weeks

Provide our students with meaningful and exciting experiences based on their interests.

Day #1 

• Collecting student voice/ interests - Learner Identity

• Oral language 

• Vocabulary 

• Critical thinking

• Collecting and analysing data

• Love of learning 

• Creativity (Drama, Visual arts including modern visual arts which use technology: photography, video, filmmaking, etc)

• Cybersmart across the curriculum

• Learn-Create-Share!!!

What a day we had! Full of fun, reading, learning, creating and sharing our reading preferences and favourite books. We had to work together in a respectful manner and give our opinions. We, teachers, were blown away by our students' ideas and thinking! It was a long day but our young learners were absolutely enthusiastic to participate in this project. They took ownership of their learning and were proud to express their learner identities.

Our students' ideas:

The feedback from my colleagues after the beginning of this project was very rewarding. They found that their students were highly engaged and motivated during various follow-up writing and reading activities.  The outcomes were impressive quantity- and quality-wise. Even the reluctant writers asked to extend their writing time to complete their work.

We will meet and share our wonderful learning next Friday! The students are very excited to share with other students and find out what the other classes created during the week.

Planning my Intervention to Raise Student Achievement in Literacy

Inquiry: How can I change my practice to raise student achievement in literacy by promoting deep learning that requires students to develop cognitive engagement and critical thinking across the curriculum using Learn-Create-Share?

I am a great believer that if a person genuinely wants to learn something, he/she will be successful. My job is to help my students find their interests, support and scaffold them during their learning process. I think about all the wonderful LCS opportunities that my learners and I can plan together to fully engage and explore in learning that is exciting and meaningful growing their learner identity as enthusiastic explorers and creators. 

This year, I’ve started to implement drama activities ‘giving students the chance to use all skills in decoding meaning, understanding the feelings of others, expanding vocabulary, making appropriate use of syntax, analyzing discourse, generating feedback within context, and building metacognitive knowledge’ (McMaster, 1998; Urian, 2000).

After analysing students voice and research findings, reading blog posts of my COL colleagues and reflecting on my teaching practice, I finalised my intervention that I have started to implement and already see clear signs of students successes.

My intervention is based on:

• Putting my students at the very centre of their learning and making their learning experiences authentic by designing LCS projects based on their interests and taking into account their identities.
• Scaffolding my learners during their projects by implementing and consistently using the tasks designed to improve their vocabulary and reading comprehension.
• Utilizing drama to develop cognitive engagement and critical thinking and raise students achievement in reading and writing.

The COVID period and its impact on my learners and inquiry.

Question: How has the Covid-19 period impacted the learners in your focus group? Will you need to make any changes to your Inquiry?

My focus students have shown consistent progress since T1 and that was assessed at the end of Term 2. I did Running records and other formative assessments including online and in-class observations. I also collected student voice about their distance learning experiences and literacy dispositions. 

For me, the COVID period was interesting for 2 reasons. First of all, it confirmed that the outcomes of my last year teaching inquiry and the tools I implemented are effective and help my students stay engaged and motivated. 

Secondly, my new teaching experiences and the structured Manaiakalani COL inquiry framework helped me shape my hypothesis and develop an intervention that I will start implementing this term. 

Before the COVID experience, I was thinking of a wider range of tools to accelerate my students in literacy; however, after referring to the research literature, analysing my own practice and my students’ voice, I decided to narrow my focus down to vocabulary and comprehension work.

Tomorrow, we’re having our reading PDL with Sheena Cameron and I hope it will help me to select the most effective strategies and tools that I could implement to support my inquiry.

Elena's COL Inquiry 2020 

Inquiry into my current teaching and self-reflection

Over the past few months, I have been looking at and analyzing current dispositions, experiences and outcomes of my students and the ways of how I can improve my own practice to address their needs and help them achieve better results in reading and writing by keeping them engaged and motivated.

By this time I have learned a lot about my learners, and it is now time to inquiry into my own teaching and analyze my strengths and areas for improvement. Firstly, I made a plan what areas of my literacy teaching I should observe and then analyze in order to grow as a professional; this included self-observation, student voice, reviewing my teacher tools and the activities that I've been using.

Many of my students identified that they need to learn more words and their meanings in order to understand texts better. I conducted a short teaching experiment by feeding forward the specific topic vocab during our dragon learn-create-share project and then giving them comprehension tasks that contained the taught vocabulary. All of my students from the target group completed the task and were proud of their results because they felt confident in using the new words and that made them feel successful in their learning.

I also identified that many students will not admit that they don't understand some words unless you ask them. I began to clarify the meaning of those words that I guessed my Y2/3 students might not fully comprehend and it showed me how many words (common from my point of view) they don't know. We also discussed the importance of understanding all words and what strategies and resources can we use to figure out unknown vocabulary.

Based on my literature review, I confirmed for myself that my hypothesis is similar to the following statement: 'nine out of 10 Year 2 students whose decoding was fluent, but whose reading comprehension was inadequate, had a low vocabulary level' (Wagner and Meros).

My next steps: 

extend, improve existing and implement new vocabulary teaching tools.

continue to use explicit instructions in inferential strategies