Feedback to Feedforward: designing a Marking Policy for KS3 and the new GCSE

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about how to tweak the KS3 curriculum taking into account the new MFL GCSE specifications. It was great to see that not much change was necessary per se, and the important goal, definitely for my team, was to put into place a rich curriculum targeted to reach Oral Fluency by the end of Y11, where real communication opportunities, international collaboration and cultural embedment in our SoWs were the key foundations, under the umbrella of a common departmental/school vision and what we know of cognitive science.

The next step is to create a clear Marking Policy anchored in meaningful feedback to move forward. It is what I like calling Feedforward.  I wrote about this in a previous post on different ways to provide feedback: Spinning the plates.  I wanted to design a clear Marking Policy that would not require my team to mark books every two weeks for the sake of it but would spell out different ways to provide feedback to students' work/performance in the classroom with the intention to check for understanding while providing clear steps for pupils to move forward. 

Nevertheless, it was important that we all had a common and clear benchmark against which to assess students' work for key pieces of productive work, especially towards the end of a learning unit. For that, I thought it would be a good idea to use the 5 Magic Powers + amount of communication/information given, as a way to help students to monitor their work and for us teachers to mark it:

1. Using more than one tense

2. Giving opinions

3. Giving reasons

4. Using reported speech

5. Using high impact expressions

The idea is to provide 5 points per Power, depending on how well each element  has been fulfilled/mastered in a productive task, giving a total of 25 points, similar to the new AQA GCSE Mark Scheme for Writing, and a further 5 points, in the case of Oral tasks to assess Pronunciation and Fluency. 

One may argue that real communication and fluency is not the sum of a specific list of elements, imposed on us, let's admit this, by the GCSE exam. In fact the new GCSE criteria for speaking and writing is very, very similar to the current one, at least in the case of AQA. I can't agree more, being fluent is more than that.

However, I see many benefits when using this benchmark:

1. We tackle some of the elements that will determine success in the inevitable final GCSE exam. This is vital. If students, as from Y7, are familiar with these elements and these are fully embedded in their language output while being fluent, in the communicative contexts when this is appropriate (we would not use 2 tenses or reported speech to perform a transactional conversation in a shop or a casual chat with a friend), the learning journey at KS4 would be much more approachable.

2. Students LOVE to know that what they are learning is actually something typical of a later stage, it makes them feel clever! ANCHORING IN CHALLENGE like Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby call it in their book Make every lesson count. It is the power of having high expectations, regardless of our students' attainment.

3. In my experience, these powers/elements work because students will always have something to say, which helps with fluency, developing motivation and self-efficacy. This doesn't mean that students speak in big monologues, but will always have something to answer when prompted with questions such as: What's your opinion on this? Why do you think this? and what happened next? 

4. The elements, especially the high impact expressions, are underpinned by real idiomatic expressions, frequency words and common verbs  that native speakers use constantly in their oral interactions: "puede ser" "suele" " puede que" " hace que" "ojalá" "si pudiera" 

Of course, this mark scheme shouldn't be used with all pieces of productive tasks but only with key pieces of writing/speaking at the end of a learning unit, when the communicative context is relevant and allows this criteria. 

When giving levels within the command of a Power: there are 3 levels with points assigned to it.

Let's take the Power: Covering the points of the task + Using more than one tense. 

There are three levels: 

Excellent command of the power, with a clear explanation of what it would be expected for this.

Good command and its explanation.

First Step: You are in the right path to command this power! This allows students to have a positive engagement with their work and a clear pathway of what is required to get to the next level. There's no failure, students just move up level at their own pace. This is important for resilience: Mistakes are the first step to learning!

This is, of course, still a working document, which I would expect to tweak, modify etc.. as the year goes by. This is the link to access the whole Marking Policy with the actual mark schemes for key pieces of writing at KS3, adaptation of the new AQA GCSE mark scheme for official end of year exams and the current GCSE KS4 mark scheme for timed writings and oral tasks for Y10 and Y11. 

Marking Policy example

15 Onenote Tips to maximise your students' learning experience and SAVE YOU TIME!

I love Onenote. It is such as great tool that allows me to carry out blended learning seemingly, saves me time, allows me to connect with my students easily and to bring my teaching to the 21st century. 

Most importantly, Onenote helps me take my subject, MFL, outside the classroom and maximise the learning experience of my students outside my four teaching walls! 

Ultimately, Onenote contributes to develop independent learning skills in my pupils, my ultimate goal!

On this post, I am assuming, you know how to create a Class Notebook within Onenote and you have one already set up. This post will focus on how to use your Onenote once this has been created by sharing with you my 15 top tips.

1. Think carefully on how you are going to structure your Content Library. 

Ideally, this should be a departmental approach. How many sections are you going to create? What will be their names? This should match your teaching methodology and Schemes of Learning/Work. In my case, I have a section for each topic I teach called: Lessons + name of topics, another section for Grammar, Blooklets, Sentence Builders, Revision Work and Subscriptions to external sites, such as Languagenut, This is Language, The Language Gym or my Quizlet folder. See my example below. 

Remember that the Content Library cannot be edited by students but anything in it can be seen by them, so if you do not want to release the content of a lesson, I would advise you to store it in the Teacher Only section of your Onenote, just below the Content Library.

2. Have a page for each week's lessons. Within my lesson sections, I create a page for a week's worth of lessons rather than a page per lesson. Sometimes there is too much content so I create a second page for an individual lesson and make it a subpage of the main week. This way, it is easy to find your lessons and it minimises your work considerably!  I store my lessons in the Teacher Only section and paste it in the Content Library when I want to distribute them to students.

3. Have a template for your lessons which you can store in the Teacher Only section. In my case the template includes a picture of my Interactive Classroom, which I created using Canva, which personalises my Onenote and makes it more colourful and attractive!

4. Populate the sections of your Content Library, little by little, with reference materials that support your subject, treating it as an area for the ultimate independent learning experience for your students!  What will your students need to support their learning and provide scaffolding? In my case it is grammar explanations, links to sample oral questions, oral booklets, translation booklets, our Sentence Builders with direct links to Quizlet courses. Any materials/booklets you would give to students, can go here, including self-assessment areas! You will save lots of time and paper in photocopying! Think of this section as the door to Independent Learning and teach your students to use it and become independent. TOP TIP What about using this area for your own video tutorials on modelling or explaining a difficult concept? You can use LOOM.

5. Use your Onenote as your teaching planning tool! I don't use a Teacher Planner anymore, as my lesson plans are in my Onenote: per week, per group, with all links to PPTs, Word Documents, external links to quizzes, Youtube Videos... It saves me time as all is in one place, which anyone in the department can share, so you can reuse each other's resources by tweaking content to match individual classes. Most importantly, you can reuse lessons from previous years too just by copying and pasting your old pages.

6. Use Page Colour when populating your page and different fonts/bolding/highlighting bits to make your lesson content attractive to learners. I also, advise you to use the Tags option on Onenote for students/you to tick tasks which have been accomplished, or classify tasks within a particular skill. MAKE YOUR LESSON ATTRACTIVE!

7.Remember that any Microsoft file will embed into your Onepage, as well as some external files, such as Genially or Youtube videos. That will make your lesson interactive and will allow your students to access such material nicely during your lesson and outside the classroom!

In the case of URL based material, such as MS Forms or Youtube videos, just copy and paste the URLs into your Onenote. In the case of MS files, just Go to Insert, file, choose your file and then, "Upload to Onenote and insert link".  

TOP TIP  Take advantage of this opportunity and think outside the box! You can also Insert external Links, as well as links within pages in your Onenote (remember the Content Reference Library?), so an opportunity to think outside the box: How can you use other external apps such as LearningApps, Flippity, Wheel of Names, Quizziz or Genially to maximise learning? I add links to all these apps directly to my Onenotes. I explain how I exploit these apps in blended learning in this blogpost.

8. Use the Snipping Tool app to select sections of a textbook, website etc.. that you want students to work on and paste the content onto Onenote. I use this all the time and it is extremely useful for a particular reading or listening activity!

9. TOP TIP!! If you want students to respond to questions, etc.. Create a Table for them to write answers on. Look at my example above, where I pasted a section of a digital textbook into Onenote with Snipping Tool, for a reading task, and then created a Table for students to write their answers in. I always change the colour of my Table to make it stand out!

10. Do not reinvent the wheel! Use all your PDFs, Word Worksheets interactively in Onenote. For that, just insert them but, instead of choosing the option shown in Tip 7, choose "Insert as printout". This will insert a copy of your document as an image (an image per page). Once this is done, right click on your image and set it as background. That way, students can either write on it directly, with a digital pen, or just type their answers! This is very useful in the case of Exampro materials, where students just type in their answers directly into the worksheet. 

11. Give feedback by Inserting an Audio, or ask students to give you oral answers to questions! This will save you lots of time when Marking!!

12. Use the Stickers within Onenote to provide feedback! They are under Insert and you can add your own text. Once created, you can save your sticker in the Teacher Only section to use later! 

TOP TIP  use the Windows+V option to access your clipboard of copied images when marking, which allows you to find your recent copied feedback stickers, for example, and just paste them when marking, without having to go to the Teacher Only section to find the sticker you need! Why don't you try to use your Bitmoji as a sticker for Feedback? See example above too. 

This is my presentation from a TILT Webinar a delivered last March on Feedback using Onenote, with lots of tips!

13. Distribute your pages to your students weekly, that's why I tend to create a page of lessons per week, so I only need to distribute one page per teaching set. This means that students get a version of your distributed page in their own section for them to edit and work on. 

TOP TIP if you make a mistake or change your lesson plan, you can delete a distributed page easily and you can also distribute pages to particular students!

14. Use the Review Student Work function when marking. This is under Class Notebook on the top of your onenote and it allows you to go through work really quickly! It only works with pages that you have distributed, not created by students, so if you want to use this function, make sure you distribute the page where you want students to work. In my case, it will be their lesson page.

15. Finally! When setting up your Class Notebook, think about the sections you want to see in your students' areas.  Structure this for them and explain to them how they are going to work, which sections to use for what and the rationale behind! In my case, I have a section for each topic (lessons), a section for Sentence Builders and a section for Prep/Homework. Students can always create their own independent sections, which I encourage them to do, but with a rationale. However, you can only distribute pages to previously created sections by you.

For a video demonstrating these tips this is my Onenote Tutorial 

ENJOY ONENOTE AND THE BLENDED LEARNING EXPERIENCE IT PROVIDES!

Teaching in Times of Covid: Providing Feedback

I have just spent my Saturday morning attending the Linguascope Annual Conference, this year online, and I am buzzing with ideas and inspiration!  So many great teachers in the MFL community! Similarly, this week I have been thinking about how I am providing feedback to my students online. I wrote a post on Feedback, which you can visit here  a few months ago, but on this post I just wanted to focus on online feedback.

I see that many teachers are using MS or Google Forms to minimise marking, or platforms such as Quizlet, Quizizz or even Blooket to collect performance data from students, which I think is brilliant, but how do we comment on this performance?

I think, providing feedback and making a personal connection with our students is essential in the current climate. Students are working more independently than ever on set tasks and it is so important to reassure them on their work and make sure that they take pride in the work the carry out and for that, feedback is essential.

These are some of my solutions!

1. Give verbal feedback when possible. Not just because it is fast for you but it is lovely for the students to hear your voice too!

If you are using Onenote, this is a must! It is incredibly quick to provide feedback about anything the kids are doing and they really appreciate your voice talking to them. If you do not use Onenote, consider using Flipgrid, where you can record your feedback, which can be shared via a QR code or a link.

 Also Vocaroo is brilliant for this!  What about using a Vocaroo link with a Congratulations Certificate? I sent this certificate last lockdown and I have a list of students for a new certificate to be sent next week. I created it with Canva.  Daniel Warren also uses Canva Certificates for her students. I email them to students and their parents. 

Qwiqr is another option for video, audio, text or web feedback, linked to a QR code that you can share with your students via email, for example. Adding a Qwqr, Flipgrid, or Vocaroo QR code or link to your Canva certificate would make it extra especial!

2. Use pre made stickers using your Bitmojis. Kids love this! You can give Merits, Alphas or whatever system your school uses to provide feedback. I have a lovely repertoire of these Bitmojis in Onenote which I just copy and paste as needed. 

3. Use personalised stickers from Onenote which you can prepare with a rubric. In my video on Top tips to use on Onenote, I show where to find them and how to insert them. Click here for the tutorial. 

4. Use the Window + V shortcut!  This allows you to copy many stickers with different pre-set comments and when clicking on Window + V, all your copied options will be there for you to select the one you need to. I learned this tip, literally last week, from Becky Jones, who shared this Youtube tutorial on twitter.  I think this a game changer to be super quick! Tutorial here from Becky Jones. 

5. Finally, encourage your students to interact with your comments!  Have they understood? What are they going to do to move forward? Close up the circle with their commitment to set themselves targets!

6. Use live verbal feedback and encouragement via Teams. This is the easiest and most obvious way to keep students motivated. Use Teams to give individual feedback in Breakout Rooms, go over a particular piece of work with a particular student, and have that special 5 minutes time with your individual students every so often. Also, give and encourage your students as a group!

The Power of Feedback: Spinning the plates!

After four weeks of teaching, today, I would like to reflect on feedback and marking, as both are intrinsically linked, although feedback should be provided by other means rather than marking. 

Feedback is key to teaching, in fact, I believe that Teaching is constant Feedback. Feedback is extremely powerful: Hattie's meta-analysis suggests that good feedback can improve the rate of learning in one year by at least 50%. In fact, the most effective learners always long for feedback on how to get better.

Consequently, feedback should not be a mere marking, ticking box exercise done for SLT or Ofsted! Feedback must take place in the classroom to inform both, our students on how to get better and us, teachers, to check understanding and re-explain, re-model etc.. accordingly. In order words, Feedback should have a double purpose: closing the learning gap for students and inform planning for us, the teachers.

What are the best ways to give feedback to students?

Of course, marking students' work will need to be done at some point, but this should be a meaningful task not a ticking exercise imposed by school without clear follow-up and strategy. There are different ways, we can carry out marking and provide effective feedback while reducing workload, these are the strategies I use to make my marking manageable while providing high impact feedback to my students:

1. Focused editing

I do not mark every single mistake. I believe this is useless. It takes me ages to do so and on most occasions students will take just a minute to go over it with no impact whatsoever. What I do is highlight those mistakes that I know they should not have made, careless mistakes I call them. When work is returned, students always spend good 10 minutes (my starter activity) going through the highlighted bits and trying to spot why they are wrong and correct these errors. Similarly, if I noticed a common pattern in all my students, before they start this process, I point out, to the whole class, some of these mistakes so we reflect on why they are wrong and how to correct them. This is an example of how marking serves to both the student, but also informs me to plan subsequently. As a consequence, after marking a particularly piece of work, I can see that more lessons may be needed to practice different Sentence Builders or a grammatical point. 

2. Mark Live

Although this is not always easy to do, every so often, I see students individually over a key piece of writing. This is mostly the case towards the end of a unit. To do this, I put two lessons aside, when students are working individually over listening practice, so that I can go through a key piece of work, oral or written, with each student at a time. This can be extremely powerful but, I am aware that it may not work with the logistics of some classes, because of large numbers, behaviour management issues etc..  While I speak to each student individually, the rest of the students need also to be 100 % focussed on another activity, which is why individual listening practice with their laptops and headphones is the perfect scenario to do this. 

3. Open Gallery where students mark each other's work

This is another great technique to do every so often, which is powerful and alleviates the marking burden in the teacher. For this purpose I use Padlet for writing and Flipgrid for oral assignments. After a topic has been studied, practised and assimilated well, students will carry out a piece of writing or oral presentation in Padlet or Flipgrid. Armed with a marking scheme, which must be very familiar to students, pupils look at each other's work and mark it accordingly to such marking scheme while spotting errors etc.. This technique is powerful because students become increasingly familiar with a mark scheme, enhancing their exam technique, while they are forced to think about common accuracy errors. Similarly, students can see everyone's work which provides a fantastic model to work from and real peer inspiration!

On the other hand, this technique would only work in a class with a good learning environment where students feel safe with each other and are open to constructive peer criticism. That's why, from day one, the culture I instil in my lessons and students is that failing is the first step to success, in other words, only if you struggle learning does take place.  By creating such culture, students become positive towards potential failure and less anxious to have their work scrutinised by a peer member of the class. 

4. Oral feedback 

Along with highlighting careless mistakes, I always give students feedback on something that went really well and two/three wishes or targets to focus on a second piece of work. This can take a lot of time to write in students' books! We use Onenote in my school, which means, that I can insert an oral audio giving specific feedback to the students much, much quicker!  Oral feedback has reduced my marking time by 50%! Students have headphones with them, and as mentioned above, after work is returned, they are given reflection time to go over my feedback and highlighted bits, individually. In fact, students can respond to my feedback with another audio, where they are asked to model some sentences etc...

If you don't use Onenote, Qwiqr is perfect to do this! Basically, using Qwiqr QR stickers, you can give students fast oral, video or photo feedback. Most importantly, students as in with Onenote, can respond to such feedback with another QR sticker, making it the perfect tool for oral modelling tasks too. 

5. Live feedback in action: Spinning the plates

Use your normal lesson activities for constant live feedback, individually or as a class! Do not wait until you mark their work. Make them think on the spot. Keep moving plates spinning at once in your lessons. This can be done individually or collectively:

• Move around, as much as we can move around in the current climate, and highlight mistakes you see on the go.
• Point individual students towards a display or a section in their Onenote or exercise/text book
• Ask students to review a paragraph or sentence
• Ask key questions (which ending would you use to talk about what your mum does over the holidays?)
• Show a model
• Alert the class of common mistakes that you have spotted, re-explain, re-practice, read aloud or show a good piece.
• Ask students how they are struggling and ask for solutions. 

If working via Onenote, going through students work, can be done from your desk so that you do not need to come near them!

6. Use self-marking tests

When planning homework tasks for classes, I try to do it so that one piece of homework is writing/reading/oral and another a learning task or listening, which I can quickly mark via a Forms test, Quizizz, LearningApps activity or just Quizlet! Students carry out the test or task in lesson time, without support and will get immediate feedback which, they report to me as a percentage. In a less digital way, I carry out classic tests in a lesson which they mark themselves, reporting their score to me. This is extremely effective as I can easily test how well they have learned vocabulary/ grammar while preventing me from taking a test home to mark!

7.Redrafting

Once feedback has been given, always ask students, in a second homework, maybe a couple of lessons later (interleaving), to carry out the task again, using the comments from their previous draft as a way to improve a subsequent version of their work. 

8. Use of Bitmojis for rewards

During lockdown I started using Bitmojis to reward good work from students. Previously, we used stickers to reward merits/ alphas etc.. according to the school protocol. However, as bitmojis are more personalised, the students preferred them so we have changed the use of old stickers for our bitmojis on Onenote. 

Giving rewards when students excel is another powerful strategy to provide psychological feedback, as students love competitions and are keen to do anything for getting my bitmoji!  This particularly works with disaffected students! By improving in small steps and being rewarded by it, students start believing in themselves and start taking pride in their work, because they feel their efforts are recognised. This culture is intrinsically linked to having high expectations on our students and expect the highest standard of work at all times, regardless of ability!  

Think about the Anchor effect: exposing students to content at a level usually considered above national expectations: at KS3, use of GCSE expressions, at GCSE, use of Alevel work. ANCHOR IN CHALLENGE and REWARD students for it, using your school system when giving FEEDBACK. This will contribute to their Growth Mindset!

By using these 8 techniques, I have witnessed how my students' work, regardless the ability has improved over the years, while my marking load has reduced drastically! FEEDBACK should be the PATH towards INDEPENDENT LEARNING so, it should be MEANINGFUL TO THE STUDENT AND INFORMATIVE TO OUR PLANNING, not a BURDEN imposed by the high spheres! Feedback should not only be present when marking but be embedded in our lessons: spinning the plates!