This term, at St Luke’s, we have been focused on giving students weekly feedback via seesaw. Each week students post one sample of work and teachers give feedback, in our stage, in the form of a star, star, wish. Although only a ‘snapshot of a snapshot’ or ‘one element of one area’ of work, it has been a positive step into providing families with a glimpse of what and how their child is doing at school. As a community, we realised that this would be important to maintain after students spent so much time posting work on Seesaw during the COVID home/online/connected learning earlier in the year. 

In Glinda’s Castle, we decided to use this as an opportunity to also develop students’ self evaluation and feedback skills. Each week when students post a sample of work, we also ask them to reflect and write 2 stars and a wish about their own work. This opened up opportunities for developing our students’ ability to  give specific and explicit feedback to themselves and others. 

We give our students the sentence starters of “I like… I like… Next time…” At the start, we found a lot of students were writing feedback like this:

Student a) 

Student b) 

As you can see, originally the students didn’t understand that the ‘I like’ was in reference to an aspect of their learning that they thought they had done well. They interpreted it as an opportunity to explain what they enjoyed about the task. Another observation we had was that students’ feedback to themselves wasn’t specifically related to the task.

The same students wrote these as their self reflection last week:

Student a)

(adjectives)

Student b) 

As you can see, both students are now trying to give task-specific feedback to themselves. The first student is now referring to the writing goal wall to check what she is doing right and what she wants to work on next time. The second student was using the learning intention and success criteria to give herself task specific feedback. 

This was as a result of almost a term’s worth of explicit teaching and modelling. Every week we ensure we practice self and peer feedback across KLAs. In this time we constantly refer to the success criteria and provide detailed examples and sentence starters to assist students to practice orally composing feedback to themselves and others. 

There is always room for improvement but it has been great to see the progress of our students as they continue to develop their ability to evaluate their own work.