Dear flowers,
For the first time in my whole 3 and half years of being at university my peers and I were given the opportunity to sit with our facilitator individually to discuss our progress and plan our upcoming assessments during our tutorial. What is unique about this unit is that it has what's called a 'negotiated curriculum' where each individual students gets to decide what they would like to learn based on what they are specifically interested in. This process is guided and tracked by the facilitator who provides many opportunities for you to improve on an assessment through resubmission based on what you have gained and taken from the feedback. Is it wishful thinking to want tutors from other units to do the same? I guess it would be a cop-out to whinge about why tutors should be giving us the individual attention we need but in all honesty... what type of work would you do, outside of hours, if you weren't paid for it?
One of my pet peeves is receiving feedback after an assessment. In week 8 the class discussed the implications of not providing useful feedback and the results were unanimous. There are markers out there who aren't exactly getting it right. Some markers attack your thoughts personally with their experience rather than critique objectively the construction of your piece of work. Some markers comment on your grammar when it is not even part of the marking criteria. Some markers say 'elaborate' when your word count is minimal. Some markers say that you should have deserved a fail and that they marked you "generously." A peer who shared this last comment with me wasn't sure if they should have felt lucky or said thank you after receiving that feedback and ended up throwing the feedback in the bin. Some markers just tick and leave you with a mark with which you are to decipher where you went wrong, how to improve in future assessments and what you did well. At this point, you can imagine, the marking criteria becomes quite meaningless.
It is no secret that markers do not find marking fun and this is understandable, especially if you have to mark 300 essays alone and by a deadline. However, when you consider the implications of providing 'destructive' feedback don't the costs on a student's self-esteem far outweigh the benefits? I was fortunate to have completed a unit last semester convened by a passionate lecturer who said that the purpose of pedagogy, assessment and outcomes is alignment. Without alignment each element will not have a purpose and thus will not translate into anything meaningful for both students and teachers. It is clear that something must be done to change the attitudes of marking to teachers, but how? Shared teacher marking should be maximised especially for units with high numbers of students. Students can learn the power of self-marking to develop their self-regulation strategies. Student can participate in peer-marking, learning how to provide praise and polish type comments and seeing the benefit of receiving more polish than praise since it helps you to improve your work. Teachers can undergo training to reignite within their minds the purpose of assessment which is to inform instruction and to help students improve. These four methods can potentially serve to motivate teachers, convenors and tutors to mark more effectively by understanding the underlying framework of alignment.
In my future classroom I would like to communicate with students on an individual level in order for them to recognise their value and purpose in being part of the learning community. I think that this is something that organised, caring and the most influential teachers do and hence what I aspire for myself. I would do this by holding individual talks with each student during silent reading time and name it something like 'tracking time.' Tracking time will allow me to track each student's progress academically and socially. I can provide meaningful feedback to each student after assignments, set them differentiated tasks according to their ZPD, discuss homework effort and individualised standards and even mention observations if I notice they are doing something a bit different from their usual behaviour. Tracking time will also allow me to target students who require extra assistance, for example students with learning difficulties, behavioural problems and gifted and talented students.
Meaningful feedback can be effectively translated through individualised interviews with students, more so than an undecipherable mark on a piece of paper. Marking should be something teachers, tutors and lecturers learn to do effectively in order to maximise each students' learning potential.
Love,
Miss Fun size
