Preparing Students to Hear Feedback

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"Because music is an inherently social activity, the music classroom is an ideal place to help students develop or improve vital social skills." Again, this is where I can be useful in the school-wide goal of improving writing. Once students are comfortable assessing themselves and others in such a social subject, hopefully they will feel as comfortable across the curriculum.

The Mystery of Talent

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"That problem is the mystery and esoteric reputation surrounding music notation and indeed music itself. The overwhelming consensus among non-musicians out there is that you must have "talent" or a secret key or something in order to take part in music." Truly, writing and music notation are so similar in this regard. People who’ve had little exposure or limited practice with writing or music notation seem to assume they have no talent for it. That it can’t be learned. My hope is to take some of the mystery out of notation and as a related result, writing.

Greater Expectations

Dweck's work was further supported in another article in the same journal. Our attempts to make kids feel good about themselves and their academic potential has backfired and students are actually questioning their potential. This article showed similar findings in lower income African-American and Native American communities. There is a vicious cycle of poor performance and low expecations. But, research like Dweck's suggests that this cycle can be broken by communicating with students about their ability to improve their performance.

Peres Elementary in Richmond, California, has 100% of its students receiving free or reduced lunch. All of the students are minorities, either African-American or Native American. The mantra of the school is, "Work hard. Get smart." Efficacy training has led to State Academic Performance Index scores improving more than 300 points. And students and teachers don't just "talk the talk." Data is shared in grade-level training sessions and with students. Poor scores are seen as an opportunity to find out what went wrong and fix it.

The bottom line of these articles and studies is that educators (and parents!) need to provide specific, constructive feedback that transparently identifies what students did well so that it can be duplicated in subsequent tasks. Also, we should point out what areas the student can improve upon and provide ample opportunities for students to apply that learning in a similar situation. Without the follow-up practice, no true learning can occur.

The Praise Paradox 3

Wulf-Uwe Meyer, psychologist, conducted another study that focused on the reactions of children when they hear other students receive praise. Meyer found that by the age of 12, children view other students who receive praise from teachers as being less capable students. Teacher praise is seen as a way to boost up those kids. They stated that students who received the most praise were the kids who were the lowest performing. Teens even concluded that those students who were criticized by their teachers, were the ones who the teachers believed had the most academic potential. Empty praise is certainly transparent to our kids. This emphasizes the need for specific feedback, rather than general praise.

Other negative side-effects of over-praising students is the resulting changes in motivation. Students start to perform merely to receive praise, rather than for the intrinsic benefit of learning for the sake of learning. Reed College and Stanford researchers followed over 150 praise studied and concluded that overly praised students will not take academic risks and do not view themselves as autonomous. These students exhibit more frequent eye-checking with teachers and speak to teachers in a way which intones question. They require praise to feel confident in their efforts and/or performance. We all know the kids who read that way, asking for confirmation from the adult who is listening. These students are also less able to attend to tasks for a more sustained period of time. This was very enlightening for me. Whether the over-praising is coming from home, school, or both, I can easily identify many students I have who fall into this category. I will have to watch myself to make sure that I am not adding to this problem.

My favorite part of this interesting article was a quote from one suburban New Jersey English teacher. She described a mother of one of her students who had complained that she was destroying the boy's self-esteem after giving him a C. The teacher's response was, "Your child is capable of better work. I'm not here to make them feel better. I'm here to make them do better." What a great message that so many parents need. But, it's a hard message to give, without offending someone.

Another important quote from the end of the article is, "A child deprived of the opportunity to discuss mistakes can't learn from them." This year, I really strove to provide timely, specific feedback to my students on ways to improve their work. I returned math tests to all of the students and had them go through and correct any of the mistakes they had made. I then met with any of them who were unable to correct the mistakes on their own. Similarly, I utilized editing checklists with my students. The conventions/grammar that they had learned were listed and they were accountable for correcting any of their errors. Checklists were personalized, depending on skills that students were on the cusp of mastering.

The Praise Paradox 2

Dr. Lisa Blackwell and Carol Dweck also published a report in an academic journal entitled, "Child Development." In this piece, Dweck and Blackwell discussed a study conducted at East Harlem's Life Science Secondary School. 700 low-achieving, minority students received semester-long interventions designed to improve their math scores. Students were separated into two random groups for an eight-session workshop. One group of students was taught study skills. In addition to study skills, the second group of students also received information about how intelligence is not innate. In two 25-minute lessons they read, studied slides, and acted about skits about how the brain actually grows new neutrons when challenged. The message they got was, "The brain is a muscle. Giving it a hard workout makes you smarter."

Teachers, who were not told which group students were assigned to, were able to identify the students who were in the "intelligence can be developed" group. They showed improved study habits and grades. Providing biological proof that intelligence can be developed by challenging one's brain was all it took to put these students on the road to improving their mathematical performance. I would like to find evidence of this online to show my students. I think that seeing the brain at work, growing, would be fascinating and motivating to them. It's one thing to say it, and completely another to be able to show it!

The Praise Paradox

I found the article, "The Praise Paradox, Are We Smothering Kids in Kind Words?", by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman (neatoday, March/April 2011), very interesting. The article discusses research conducted by Dr. Carol Dweck, Columbia University. Dweck and her colleagues have studied the effect of student praise in 20 New York schools. 400 fifth-grade student, over a ten-year period, were given a series of puzzles, designed to test their IQ. The first test in the series was simple enough that all students did fairly well. Following the test, students were randomly divided into two groups and given one line of praise. Feedback on their performance positively reflected either their intelligence or their effort.

Students were then given a second test. They were offered a choice of a more difficult test, in which they would learn a lot, or an easy test, similar to the first one they had taken. Researchers found that 90% of the students who had received feedback praising their effort chose to take the more difficult of the tests. Most of the students who had been commended for their intelligence, chose the easier test. Dweck concluded that the group of students who felt that they were "smart", wanted to maintain the appearance of intelligence, rather than risking lower performance on the more difficult test.

The same students were then tested again, but were not given a choice for difficulty. The test was designed to be far more difficult than either of the first two. Everyone failed. The students who had received praise for their effort, appeared to try harder to solve the difficult puzzles, finally crediting their failure to a "lack of focus." The "smart" group visibly struggled during the testing and attributed their lack of success to the fact that they weren't so smart, after all.

Finally, a fourth round of testing, using puzzles with the same level of difficulty as the first, was administered. Students who had been originally provided with positive feedback about their effort showed 30% improvement on their scores, while the students who received praise for the intelligence performed 20% poorer than they had on the initial round of testing.

The implications of the study are that providing students with information about their effort provides them with variables that they can control. Students who are only told how smart they are, lack control. Children can adjust how much effort they choose to exert, but view their level of intelligence as a predetermined factor.

This article provided me with information that I can use right now. I will work to comment about specific details of students' work, not just make general statements that don't communicate what they did to earn the praise in the first place. However, it did generate some questions in my mind as well. What about the student who is working very hard, but not making progress? Sometimes I struggle to find a specific, positive comment to make because the student is struggling so much. I can certainly continue to praise their effort, but at some point, that's got to wear thin. It must feel like "spinning their wheels", but not really getting anywhere. Also, I wonder what to do about students who are highly intelligent, but give very little effort. I can think of one student in particular who is very bright and highly capable of achieving far more than he is. He is not interested in hearing or applying the constructive feedback that his peers and I are providing. He thinks he's smarter than everyone else, and therefore doesn't have to try very hard.

Teaching Summary Writing

I am a third grade teacher, new to the grade level and to the wonderful world of CSAP. In planning and preparing for administering the tests, I realized that my students would be asked to summarize the passage they read. I thought about the difference between retelling and summarizing. I had a lot of experience with having students retell what they read on the DRA…enough to know that they need to tell me the whole story—every little detail. The more the better! From looking at the model responses shown in prep books and online at the CDE website, I realized that summarizing was quite different. I went out and purchased a book of writing lessons, complete with ideas about teaching the skill of summarizing.

The book provided texts for the students to read and walked them through steps that would lead to a well-written summary. I was pleased with my find and dove right in to teaching my students how to do it. I was so disappointed in the result! What I had thought would be a simple, helpful set of lessons was a disaster. Some students just melted down and couldn't even being to understand what to do. My higher readers and writers simply copied the information, almost entirely from the passages. I was so frustrated! I shared my concerns with my teammate, who lent me the book Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling, Skills for Better Reading, Writing, and Test Taking, by Emily Kissner . This book made me feel slightly better because it stated that students do not truly master the skill of summary writing until around the 7^th grade. As 3^rd graders, my students and I (AND the creators of my writing instruction book!) had very different ideas about what were the most important parts of each passage. To them, the most important parts were the same as the parts that they found the most interesting. They wanted to include their favorite parts, which were the extra details that really should be left out of a summary. While the information in the book helped me feel better about lowering my expectations for my students summaries, I am still frustrated because they have to do so many of them on CSAP and on the DPS Interim Exams.

Next year I will be teaching 4^th grade. I will have to give two more rounds of CSAPs before the replacement goes into effect. I will spend time over the summer investigating ways to help my students write age-appropriate summaries.