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With our guiding principles for remote teaching as flexibility, generosity, and transparency, we know that there is no one solution for assessment that will meet all faculty and student needs. From this perspective, the primary concern should be assessing how well students have achieved the key learning objectives and determining what objectives are still unmet. It may be necessary to modify the nature of the exam to allow for the differences of the remote environment. This document, written for any instructor who typically administers an end-of semester high-stakes final exam, addresses how best to make those modifications.
 
Check out the full resource here, and read more about the three primary alternatives to a semester-end final:
1) Multiple lower-stakes assessments (most preferred)2) Open note exams (preferred)3) Online proctored exams (if absolutely necessary) 
 

Written by Erik Skogsberg
Assessing Your Teaching
In the push to end the semester, it’s tempting to completely disconnect from all that happened in your classes as soon as you submit grades. Now, we certainly hope everyone has a restful break, but we also hope you’ll set aside some time to assess your teaching before next semester begins. This assessment is a crucial piece of your overall development as a teacher and can greatly impact your work with students next semester. In our closing blog post for the semester, we want to provide you with some suggestions for reflecting on fall semester: taking stock of where you’ve been with students this semester and using that information to guide your decisions next semester.
Learning From Your Final Assessment
We can’t underscore enough how important assessment is in teaching and learning. It’s the means with which you gather the necessary info you need on student learning and make evidence-based decisions on where to go next. Now, in ending the semester, you have the focal point of your final assessments to provide evidence out of which to base future teaching decisions. And whether you’re teaching the same course or a completely different one, there’s still much to be gained from this kind of reflection. To help your reflection in connection to your final assessments, we offer the following questions:
Three Questions for Reflecting Forward
1) Did you meet your learning objectives?: You hopefully set out work in your course with some specific overall learning objectives for students. Did students meet them? What evidence do you have in your final assessments? In what areas were they strongest? In what areas did they struggle? In meeting or not meeting your learning objectives, you have some clear areas of focus and further development. And by connecting back across your objectives and final assessments, you can take stock of what you believe worked well for teaching and learning and what did not.
2) What instructional practices worked best?: Think back to the instructional practices and activities connected to the strongest and weakest areas of your final assessments.  Perhaps students struggled most with synthesizing certain elements of your course or analyzing a key text. Or maybe you realized students just weren’t able to adequately back up the claims they made in the final paper as you hoped. What instructional activities did you design in order to support them? By identifying these specific practices and activities, you can begin to address any common patterns or clear areas for future focus.
3) Where do you need to grow next semester?: Answering this final question–in light of the previous two above–can send you into next semester with clear teaching goals and areas for your own development. If you’re teaching the same course again, then we’d suggest you start proactively identifying and adjusting areas of your course you know need to work better. If you’re teaching a completely different course, you can still make sure you’re focusing in on similar learning outcomes and/or areas of instructional practice even if the content isn’t the same. For help, in addition to seeking out the assistance of other instructors in your college, we’d encourage you to take advantage of the digital resources we offer on the Inside Teaching MSU website, the upcoming #iteachmsu chats, and The Graduate School and MSU Academic Advancement Networkworkshops. We regularly offer resources and opportunities on our blog, as well as via social media and through in-person workshops. If you aren’t already engaged with us across those spaces, perhaps make that part of your development goals for next semester.
We’d like to know: What process do you use to reflect and build on your teaching between semesters? Where do you find the best support for areas you want to improve? Share your thoughts on social media using “#iteachmsu” or in the comments section below.

Photo Credit: Teach/Learn/Duane Schoon/CC 2.0/Cropped

Written by Erik Skogsberg
Questions Driving You
Why did you choose the discipline you’re teaching and researching in now? What was it about its unique lens on the world that inspired you? Sometimes, in the rush to design syllabi and curriculum, and feeling buried by stacks of grading at points, it can be easy to forget the reasons we were driven to choose our disciplines in the first place. And just as these reasons inspired and inspire you, so too can they inspire students and provide a cohesion to your curriculum. This week’s post will provide some ideas for designing your course out of the foundational perspectives and questions that guide your discipline.
Questions Driving Your Course
Scholars have advocated for designing classroom work out of the very real inquiry and issues at the core of our academic disciplines. Applebee (1996) believes that our curriculum design should support the opportunity for our students to engage in the “conversations” that have built our disciplines and continue to sustain our inquiry within them. Bain (2004), in his study of what makes for the best college teaching, found some of the most impactful teachers to be the ones basing their courses out of the disciplinary questions that mattered to them. And McTighe and Wiggins (2005) suggest the use of what they call “essential questions” from your discipline to anchor your syllabus, teaching, and learning.  Even in introductory courses, framing in this manner can help students be more active participants in their learning as they take up the very real current questions that the discipline seeks to answer outside the classroom. So, as you begin your course this week, we have four questions for you to ask yourself in an effort to drive your course with the questions driving you:
Why did you choose your discipline?: Answering this question can oftentimes help re-anchor you in the fundamental passion and inquiry at the core of your discipline and help you better see through the perspectives of your students. From there, you can identify the specific questions your discipline attempts to answer.
What questions does your discipline attempt to answer?: Here is where you can begin to stake some claims about the affordances and limits of your discipline’s view of the world. Does your discipline seek answers connected to literary interpretation and meaning-making? About the best ways to engineer physical structures? Your discipline no doubt asks and answers through specific lenses.
How are the questions in your discipline currently being asked in your discipline and out in the world?: Contemporary relevance can help with overall engagement, as students see how what they’re doing in your course may connect with present-day applications. This allows students to begin to answer the “so what?” about your course and why one may care to know the content and skills you’re engaging in.
How does your course help students ask or begin to ask the questions you identified in two and three above?: Your curriculum design choices are key. Provide opportunities for students to be anchored in the real inquiry and perspectives that matter most in your discipline. Make this inquiry explicit along the way. Your assessment choices are also important here, as you have the opportunity to provide real-world tasks for students that you and others in your discipline would engage in outside the classroom.
We want to know: How do you design curriculum in ways connected to inquiry and perspectives at the core of your discipline? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below or on social media using the hashtag “#iteachmsu.”
Applebee, A. N. (1996). Curriculum as Conversation: Transforming Traditions of Teaching and Learning. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press.
Bain, K. (2004). What the Best College Teachers Do. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by Design, Expanded 2nd Edition. Alexandria, VA: Pearson.
Photo Attribution: Questioned Proposal/Ethan Lofton/CC 2.0/Cropped

We all have origin stories. Here’s one of mine:
 
I am 22 and about to finish my Bachelor’s degree. At this point, I’ve been an improv instructor for three years. I’ve taught people of all ages and have long considered the power dynamics and spaces of vulnerability that improv games interrogate. My university has a bi-annual in-house professional development institute called the Institute for Student Success. I inquire about applying. I am told that as a student, I do not meet the qualifications to lead a workshop because of what people expect professionally. I laugh at the irony that a conference labeled “Student Success” doesn’t include student presenters. I casually mention it to a professor I am TAing for. She says we and another professor should apply. I write the proposal. We apply. We get in. The day comes and they say, “This is Eve’s rodeo. We’re just here to spectate and participate.” We play games. I convince 20 professors and staff members to play some games, shake it out, play wooshbong, and make representations of semicolons with our bodies. (Outside, mind you, because we were asked to move for being too loud.) We end with a discussion on the application of games in different class sizes and disciplines and what to do with the decentering of authority activities like games bring to the space. I am told the workshop was well received. An administrator I meet at the social following the institute tells me I should continue on to grad school, but that I should find a funded program. She plants the seed in my head that I can get a full ride. I get two letters of recommendation from those professors. I apply to Michigan State. I get accepted. I move to Lansing, Michigan to attend Michigan State University (MSU) as a Master’s student in Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures (WRAC).
 
I open this post with an origin story from my path to graduate school to 1) model a way to reflect on our positioning and 2) to suggest that reflection is an important tool in considering our place and our work as educators. I want to engage in what Paulo Freire called praxis, or “reflection and action,” (51) understanding that both are needed for effective pedagogy. A belief in praxis accepts that we are both instructors and learners; we have much to learn from our students. Engaging in reflection is an important part of figuring out how to align your goals, with your teaching, with your research, and your place in your institution. In this post, I will continue to reflect on my personal positioning to offer a model for reflection and I will do this by meditating on my positionality on three levels: the personal, the classroom, and the institutional.
The Personal
If I interrogate the origin story I composed for you in the opening, I can see traces of my identities and how I ended up here. I have long been interested in pedagogy and the circulation of knowledge in learning spaces through my experiences running an improv team. I can see a way of using power I seek to emulate as an instructor: trusting the expertise of students and finding ways to funnel resources back to students, as the two professors in my story did. I still benefit from their trust and am grateful for their model of student mentorship. I also see my experience as a first-generation student and the things I could not have known. It really was that day that someone first put the notion in my head that I could get a full ride. This story was cited in two of my letters of recommendation to grad school. Imagine if I had never been able to present? I would definitely be somewhere else.
 
I carry many stories with me. Many ideas about what I am doing and what my purpose is here. As an educator, I seek to reflect on these notions of teaching, and more specifically, how power plays into these stories. For example, in the stories of education I’ve inherited from my parents, there is great deference for teachers. Growing up, I was taught that to teach in Mexico is considered a noble public service. Paralleling those stories of nobleness, my mom and dad can also recant stories of corporal punishment in schools and the strictness of their teachers (a particular disciplinarian with fingers full of rings is one my father never forgot). Power sits at the center of these stories and I have carried that notion of power with me throughout my educational career. It affected me when I was a student and when I entered my first university classroom. As an individual, I have to juggle my notions of power as I decide how to act in my role as an educator.
Some questions I ask myself:
What stories about teaching and learning do I come with and how to they affect my expectations of the present?
 
If I have authority in an educational space, what function does it serve and what do I do with it?
The Classroom
As an instructor, I am given a certain amount of authority to define what happens in the day-to-day. Part of reflecting on my position in the classroom space is thinking about what I bring to the space and what I expect the purpose of the space to be. Kathleen Blake Yancey’s three levels of curriculum offers us a useful way to consider this. She identifies three types of curriculum: the lived, delivered and experienced. The lived curriculum is what students already bring with them. The delivered is what an instructor brings to the classroom. The experienced curriculum is the curriculum as it occurs in the classroom (16-17).
 
What I find most useful in this model is that it highlights the multiplicities of experiences that inhabit our classroom. To imagine students as already bringing expertise and knowledge about the curriculum means I need to step back in assuming everyone is starting at the same place. In this model, I only have direct authority over the delivered curriculum, or what I bring to class prepared. I imagine the experienced curriculum exists somewhere between the lived and delivered, in real time, the day of class; all people participating have authority over the experienced.
 
As a TA who has just begun teaching first-year writing, being nervous about my delivered curriculum feels like a common struggle. As I was planning out our projects for this semester, I remember feeling stuck with what components to include. Do I ask them to present project 2? Do we watch a movie for project 3 or 4? Do we make multimodal projects? Reflecting on the process of constructing my delivered curriculum, I decided it was best to just ask my students. Like our syllabus, class expectations and our rubrics, negotiating components of projects seemed a worthwhile endeavor. Rather than guessing at what would be “good for them” or what they would enjoy, I asked. We negotiated and they agreed to the value of multimodal projects and presenting in class. This process was well worth it and now even my delivered curriculum is directly affected by their input.
Some questions I ask myself:
What can I do to promote the distribution of power more equitably, even if I can’t completely give it up?
 
How can I make my choices as an instructor transparent?
 
If a student is resisting, what does this moment of resistance reflect about the classroom and my curriculum, not necessarily about the student themselves?
The Institutional
Reflecting on your position on an institutional level means thinking about your place in the institution and how that affects the other two levels and your work. For the purposes of this post, I will reflect on the different institutional organizations that I am a part of. For me, most of my institutional commitments are in my department, this Inside Teaching Fellowship, being part of the Indigenous Graduate Student Collective (IGSC) and the Michigan Indigenous/Chicanx Community Alliance (MICCA), and my work in community engagement with my faculty adviser Dr. Estrella Torrez, the Writing Center and local middle schools (Nuestros Cuentos, Beyond Insights, PhotoVoice).
 
For my work as a community-engaged scholar, reflecting on my institutional positioning means thinking about my commitments and how I can work in spaces where I am 1) diverting institutional resources back to students to create culturally relevant spaces and 2) working to erode the problematic “local community” and “university” divide. Reflecting on my institutional commitment also means pushing back on institutional policies/ideologies that reinforce problematic university/local community divides in the organizations I am a part of and orienting my work towards community engagement. Through my involvement with IGSC and MICCA, I have been part of the collaborative creation of culturally-relevant spaces for my peers and myself. By working w/ Dr. Torrez and in Outreach the Writing Center, I have been part of bridging local community/university divides through working with local schools. One area where I know I am lacking is being able to implement a reciprocal community-engaged component in my classroom. Part of what limits me comes from my short time here at MSU (2 year program) and institutional support in doing this. Nevertheless, reflection can still aid me in considering how I would continue to push for such components in my class here next semester or at my next institution.
Some questions I ask myself:
What is my purpose in my institutional relations and what am I making from these relations?
 
If I have access or input on the division of resources, where are they going and what are they doing for whom?
 
How can I keep the local community in mind in the work I do?
 
Praxis is not always easy. It means a commitment to interrogating our actions, beliefs and parts of ourselves we may not always have easy access too. Praxis might mean you change your ideas and beliefs when you really dig down and think about them; it might mean you reinforce them more. Nevertheless, it is a process and one I advocate for because it has the ability to make us more thoughtful and more intentional instructors. I offer this three part model and reflection in the understanding that it is limited, but in the hopes that it can give you a place to start reflecting on your own stories, practices and personal relations.[1]
 
Works Cited
 
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, New York, 2000. Print
 
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. Teaching Literature as Reflective Practice. National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, IL, 2004. Print.
 
Consider some of the reflection questions and share your responses with us in the comments below.
 

 
Originally posted at “Inside Teaching MSU” (site no longer live): Cuevas, E. Three Levels of Praxis: A Model for Reflection on Teaching. inside teaching.grad.msu.edu

In our last blog series, we focused on different feedback methods to help you save time by planning and distributing the labor of grading.  Since we have finished that blog series and held a IT lounge about feedback and assessment methods, we realized we had not addressed how to respond to a large amount of student work (large here meaning the size of a lecture course like biology, which is typically 50+). In this blog post, we will address the problems of assessing a large amount of student writing (which you may already know too well!) and offer tools and solutions for dealing with this workload.
Assessing Large Amounts of Student Work
According to the U.S. News and World Report on Education, Michigan State has approximately 38,786 undergraduates enrolled. When you have the opportunity to be a teaching assistant for the large lecture courses (approximately 23% of classes here have more than 50 students), it can feel like you are grading all of them!
Because you are also a graduate student, you have your own work to do: exams to pass, dissertation to write, and job materials to gather. But that’s beside the point–you want to be a helpful teacher while balancing all of your many responsibilities . So what do you do? How do you manage large amounts of student work?
Tools & Solutions
Distribute the labor with a calibrated peer review system like Eli Review or CPR (http://cpr.molsci.ucla.edu/Home.aspx). Earlier we talked about setting your students up to give feedback to each other, but this gets tricky in larger classroom because there are so many logistical steps that may leave you facing more challenge. However, there is a solution! Calibrated peer review systems work to take care of the logistical setup of peer review (How will students share their work? With whom will they share it? What kind of comments will they provide each other? When will all this happen?). Systems like Eli Review (a homegrown product from MSU) facilitate much of the process of letting your students give feedback to each other, as well as tell each other how helpful feedback was.
 
If you are a Michigan State affiliate, Eli is free when you use it for Michigan State courses. Currently, Eli is integrated with D2L, so you can activate your account through your course’s D2L site. This video shows you how. Then follow the getting started guide.
 
If you are outside MSU, systems like CPR (http://cpr.molsci.ucla.edu/Home.aspx) are available. If you use a course management system (CMS) like Canvas, they also have built in systems to facilitate this kind of review process.
 
When using Eli Review and systems like Eli, we have had success by following these five pedagogical principles and practices:
1) Design a writing assessment document, or rubric, with clear learning goals that you can scaffold.
Before students ever sit down to review one another, make sure you have made clear the writing practices a given assignment is designed to foster. We have found we are most successful as writing teachers when we make the learning goals or criteria for writing assignments as transparent and explicit as possible. This allows you and students to save time by staying on track and using a common measuring standard.
2) Introduce the concept of review early and model how students can review their colleagues’ work.
Review doesn’t need to wait on a completed draft. Instead, Eli is designed to help instructors review early, and review frequently. When we have taught writing, we have found that developing a culture of review early on in a course has helped our students’ overall learning because it front loads assignments and tasks with the learning goals in mind. However, we have also found that students frequently ask us what it is we are “looking for.” And indeed, it’s helpful to show students how to engage in a review process that leads towards your (or your program’s) course goals. Show students what kinds of feedback can be helpful toward working toward those outcomes and how to practice that kind of feedback so that students can begin to effectively respond to each other.
3) Start small and review more frequently.
Review doesn’t need to happen all at once. Instead, we have found it helpful to isolate learning goals in review activities, and to center reviews around a limited set of criteria, rather than around a holistic evaluation of writing quality. If a goal of your writing assignment, for example, is to make a convincing argument, then it may be helpful to have separate reviews that focus respectively on the quality of students’ claims and the quality of their evidence. Because you are breaking down larger assignments, students would be able to do small review assignments for each other quickly and efficiently in a low stakes way.
4) Use the rubric throughout the entire project, not just for final assessment.
There is plenty of research about the value of using rubrics as instructional tools. In the case of peer review, however, using the rubric as a common document for understanding the nature and purpose of a writing assignment can ensure that peer review provides a large quantity of feedback without sacrificing the quality or richness of that feedback.
5) Check in with your students to see how well it is working.
Despite all the positive benefits of the feedback we’re describing, it’s not going to work without strong pedagogical direction, and at times, intervention. Talk to your students — learn what feedback has been helpful, what hasn’t, and ask for suggestions about what can improve their experience of the process and help your feedback system become more effective.
 
We want to hear from you! What methods do you use for responding to large amounts of student work? What methods haven’t worked? Use the hashtag #ITeachMSU to share your answers with us on Twitter and Facebook.
 

 
Originally posted at “Inside Teaching MSU” (site no longer live): Noel Turner, H. & Gomes, M. Methods Not Madness: Five Steps for Responding to Work in Large Classes. inside teaching.grad.msu.edu

What if I told you about this magical teaching practice that, done even once, produces large improvements in student final exam scores[1], helps narrow the grade gap between poorly prepped and highly prepped first year college students[2], and might even result in more positive course reviews[3],[4]? What if I also told you this magical teaching practice is something you already know how to do? What if I told you, the secret to increasing your students’ success and  overall satisfaction is……more TESTS!?
Okay…well to be fair, it’s a little more nuanced than that. While adding just one test to a class does indeed improve final exam scores, it turns out that more frequent, graded exercises in general improve learning outcomes for students [2],[5]. Even better – if these exercises are low stakes, they can improve learning outcomes without increasing student anxiety [4],[6].
We often view testing as an unpleasant but necessary way to assess student performance. It may be time for us to instead view testing as a useful teaching tool and to implement an assessment system that maximizes the potential learning benefits. In this post I will discuss the important known benefits of frequent, low stakes assessments as well as some practical tips for how to maximize these benefits without adding undue stress to your life or the lives of your students.
Benefit #1: “Thinking about thinking”
Testing can improve a student’s metacognition, or their ability to “think about thinking.”  A good metacognitive thinker understands how their thought processes work and can pay attention to and change these processes [7]. A student with strong metacognitive skills can therefore more successfully monitor, evaluate, and improve their learning compared to students lacking these skills. Unfortunately, many students struggle with metacognition and must contend with “illusions of mastery” (or thinking they understand a subject better than they actually do).  Self-testing is a good way to prevent illusions of mastery, but many students do not incorporate self-testing into their studying, instead electing more passive modes of exam preparation such as rereading texts[8]. Incorporating more testing into the curriculum forces students into the position of making mistakes and receiving feedback, allowing them to frequently measure their learning in relation to expectations and adjust accordingly. Again, note that providing feedback is an essential part of this process.
Benefit #2: Practice Remembering
Testing can improve a student’s long term memory of information presented in class by forcing students to recall what they’ve learned through a cognitive process called active retrieval. Active retrieval strengthens neural pathways important for retrieving memories, allowing these memories to be more easily accessed in the future.
 
While any sort of retrieval practice is useful, it is most beneficial when it is effortful, spaced, and interleaved.  An example of effortful retrieval practice includes testing which forces students to provide the answers (i.e. Short answer and fill in the blank questions as opposed to multiple choice). More effortful retrieval also occurs with spaced and interleaved practice.
Spaced practice is testing that occurs after enough time has elapsed for some (but not complete) forgetting to occur (i.e. Present the information and then wait a couple months, days, or even just until the end of class to test students on it). Interleaved practice incorporates different but related topics and problem types, as opposed to having students practice and master one type at a time (e.g. cumulative testing where you mix problems from different units together). Interleaved practice can help students learn to focus on the underlying principles of problems and to discriminate between problem types, leading to more complex mental models and a deeper understanding of the relationships between ideas[6].
How to Implement More Assessments (Without Losing Your Mind)
So, all you have to do now is come up with a ton of quiz and test questions and free up a bunch of class time for assessments! Don’t forget you also need to grade all of these! After all, feedback is an important part of the process, and frequent (even low stakes) grading has the added benefits of enhancing student motivation, attentiveness, and attendance.I know what you busy teachers (ie. all of you) out there are thinking….“Your ”magical” teaching practice is starting to sound like a hugely effective pain in my butt.”
 
Don’t give up on me now though! There are some fairly simple ways to add more assessments to your curriculum. Furthermore, you should be able to do this sans student rebellion because these assessments are low-stakes. Frequent, low-stake assessments as opposed to infrequent, high-stakes assessments actually decrease student anxiety overall because no single test is a make it or break it event. In fact, several teachers have reported a large increase in positive student evaluations after restructuring their classes in this way[3],[4],[6]!
 
Below I lay out some tips for getting the most out of shifting your assessment practices while maintaining both your own and your students’ sanity:
1) Know that “effortful” testing is not always necessary
While effortful testing is best for retrieval practice, even basic, easily graded recognition tests such multiple choice questions still offer benefits, such as helping students remember basic (but important!) information[6],[9].
2) Create different assessment questions
You can also make assessments more effortful by creating questions that engage higher cognitive processes. Now you can sit back, relax, and indulge in one of my personal favorite pastimes (watching student brains explode) without the stressful grading!
3) Make use of educational technologies to ease your grading
For instance, clicker tests are a quick way to test students and allow you to provide feedback for the class all at once.
4) Make assessments into games
If your students need a morale boost, make a quiz into a trivia game and give winning groups candy. Some good old competition and Pavlovian conditioning may make students reassess their view of testing.
5) Assess participation
Doing something as simple as a participation grade will still provide students with incentive without overburdening them or yourself. For instance, this type of grading would work in conjunction with #3.
6) Keep graded assessments predictable
Making assessments predictable as opposed to utilizing pop quizzes helps students feel at ease.6 Furthermore, if they students KNOW an assessment is coming, they are more likely to study and pay attention.
7) Find ways to revisit old material in your assessments
Making assessments cumulative is an effective way to space out your review of material and has the added benefit of making problems interleaved and effortful, all of which maximize retrieval practice[6].
8) Have students reflect on mistakes
You can help students develop metacognitive skills by giving them opportunities to reflect upon and correct their mistakes on assessments. For instance, have students take a quiz and then discuss their answers/thinking with their classmates before receiving feedback. You can also give students opportunities to create keys to short answer questions and grade their own and several (anonymous) classmates’ answers. This will allow them to think through what makes an answer complete and effective.
9) Break large assessments into small ones
Instead of creating new assessments, break up large ones into multiple, lower-stakes assessments. For example, consider replacing big tests with several quizzes. Consider scaffolding large projects such as independent research projects and term papers. Ask for outlines, lists of references, graphs, etc. along the course of the semester before the final project is due. This might cause more work for you in the short term but can help prevent complete disasters at the end of the semester, which can be time consuming.
10) Utilize short daily or weekly quizzes
If you don’t want to adjust a big project/test or lose class time by adding time-consuming assessments, consider adding short daily or weekly quizzes. These grades can add up to equal one test grade. One could consider dropping the lowest score(s) but allowing no make ups to reduce logistical issues.
 
These are only a few of the many strategies one can use to transition to a frequent, low-stakes assessment system. What are your experiences with low stakes assessments?  Have you made use of any which seem particularly effective in enhancing student learning?
 
Related Reading:
Much of the information about the benefits of testing is from:
Brown, P.C., Roediger III, H.L., McDaniel, M.A. (2014). Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
 

 
Originally posted at “Inside Teaching MSU” (site no longer live): Jones, S. A Case for More Testing: The Benefits of Frequent, Low-Stakes Assessments. inside teaching.grad.msu.edu

For the last few weeks, we have been offering time-saving tips for delivering feedback to individual students and to larger groups as they work on projects for your classes. But we suspect that now, since the semester is over, you likely will not be giving your students much formative feedback.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t use this time to improve the efficiency of your feedback processes. Now that the semester is over, you have a great opportunity to do some forward thinking about next semester. And, if you plan it right, we think you can actually provide your students with more feedback, while spending less time delivering that feedback.
In this post, we detail the design of a semester and feedback plan to maximize the amount of feedback students receive on their work and minimize the time we spend writing to students.
Designing Semester and Feedback Plans
Although designing a semester plan for your class seems like a daunting task, it allows you to frontload scheduling due dates, giving you more time during the actual semester to flesh out the specifics of your course (like assigned readings and class activities) as it progresses week to week, assignment to assignment. To create this kind of plan, we are providing you with starting points that focus on two essential functions of your classroom: what you ask students to produce, and what kind of feedback they will need for those products. By creating a rough timeline of assignments and feedback, you can avoid overbooking your schedule (and yourself), and respond to students more efficiently.
Designing a Semester Plan

Make a list of your major assignments. When will you introduce an assignment to your class? What are the goals of those assignments? How long will these assignments take for students to complete?
Make a list of your minor assignments. What smaller activities does the class need to complete to support that major assignment? How long will those take? Will they require feedback from you, their peers, the class as a whole (hey we have plenty of resources to help you with this btw)? Where will these varieties of feedback be most beneficial for students in your class?
Identify places where students need feedback. Do your students need your feedback on one major assignment before they can complete the next one? What goals do the minor projects support?
Consider your own schedule. Now is also a good time to remember to plan your semester timeline in accordance with your own academic life–are there weeks you will attend conferences? If you are a graduate student, when are your final projects due? When are your exams? Maybe avoid scheduling due dates around this time.

Designing a Feedback Plan

Schedule products. After you’ve listed your major and minor assignments and the amount of time they’ll take, begin placing them on a timeline.
Identify goals. Based on the overarching goals for a unit or a semester, which goals does each of these assignments support? Articulating these in advance will help guide how you design feedback prompts in the future.
Identify kinds of feedback students can receive. Knowing that there are a variety of ways to respond to student work, identify specific kinds of feedback students can receive to enhance their performance along project goals.
Distribute feedback moments across time, and distribute labor across people. This is a point we emphasized in our earlier posts — don’t plan all your feedback to come at once. If you distribute the work of feedback across time, students will receive more — and more focused — responses, and will likely absorb more of their feedback.
Distribute the labor of giving feedback across people. Students will receive more feedback (and, we believe, will learn more) if you give them the responsibility of responding to their colleagues at critical moments in a project.

Check out a model feedback plan based on a unit Matt used in his class in the Spring 2015 semester.
 
As you can see, with this feedback plan, students receive feedback throughout the whole process of producing their research papers and projects, and get feedback on every minor product that leads up to the major products. The feedback is also designed so that students receive feedback on each of the goals for the Research Unit.
 
However, this feedback plan is designed to minimize the amount of time Matt spends writing to students. During the whole unit, he will only need to write to students two times (Week 3 and Week 7), and might write a total of 3 paragraphs to each student. But, he will also offer individuals feedback through verbal feedback during scheduled class time and in individual conferences (Week 8 and Week 11), and provide verbal feedback to the whole class on several occasions (Week 2, Week 6, Week 7).
 
While not all teachers have the luxury to control all parts of their assignments or schedule, we hope and believe the strategy of developing a Feedback Plan is flexible enough to work for many teachers.
 
We’d Love to Hear from You: What methods do you use to schedule your assignments? What projects take up the most time during your semester? What do you do when the timing of a unit is too fast or slow? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.
 

 
Originally posted at “Inside Teaching MSU” (site no longer live): Gomes, M. & Noel Turner, H. Lighten Your Load: Planning for More Efficient Feedback Next Semester. inside teaching.grad.msu.edu

We are writing teachers, and in the world of writing, feedback is HOLY. But does that mean we love spending every waking hour responding to student work? Indeed it does not! But because we’re writing teachers, we see lots of writing, and think a lot about how to devise ways of making our lives easier.
 
In this post, and in others, we’ll discuss ways to reduce the amount of concentrated time you spend providing feedback by creatively harnessing classroom resources. We’ve found it essential to distribute the labor of providing feedback across time and people. In other words, don’t do it all at once, and don’t do it all yourself. This week, we offer ways for providing individual feedback once a project is under way.
Teacher-to-Student Feedback: Four Ways to Narrow Your Parameters
Both of us know that sitting with a stack of 50 student papers and no strategy other than “get through them” can be daunting. So, what can you do to strategize?
Do you offer as much feedback as you can muster? Do you let feedback emerge organically from your first read of a project? While there are times when this can be a pedagogically useful approach (usually at the beginning of a project), we’ve found there are more efficient ways to respond. Here are some strategies we’ve used to narrow parameters & get work done:

Ask students to craft one question about their work, and use that question to guide your feedback. Since we teach writing, a question we receive from a student might look something like this: “Does the organization of my paper make sense?” Students’ questions limit the scope of our responses, as long as we insist on only responding to only those questions.
Craft your own question about students’ work, and use that question to guide your feedback. Specific questions can often provide useful feedback (for example, “how well does evidence support the thesis?”). In Matt’s experience, the more specific the question, the less time he spends thinking about how to respond.
Have students identify a specific outcome or assessment criterion they are concerned with, and respond only to that concern. When Matt uses this strategy, the question becomes “What does this student need to do in order to perform better along specific project goals or assessment criteria? What do they need to do to become a more reflective writer (project goal) or to organize their claims effectively (criterion)?” This strategy has the added benefit of prodding him to specifically elaborate on his understanding of outcomes or assessment criteria.
You can identify a specific outcome or assessment criteria too. Maybe you only want to reply to students’ engagement with previous literature — maybe responding to only that one thing will be most pedagogically useful. We get it, it works, it saves time.

Student-to-Student Feedback: Four Ways to Redistribute the Labor of Response
Like we promised earlier, it’s entirely possible to distribute the labor of responding across a class. For example, many of you are probably familiar with peer review, and some of you may even use peer review. Here are a few recommendations we have for facilitating student-to-student feedback activities:

Model feedback for students. Maybe they’ve given feedback to their peers before, maybe they haven’t. Show students what good feedback looks like to you. We like soliciting work from previous and current students and modeling in class how we would respond to that student’s work.
Create effective feedback structures. While some students might do great with open-ended prompts for offering feedback, in general, that feedback will only improve with well-structured prompts you’ve designed.
Do it regularly. Don’t just talk about student-to-student feedback once at the beginning of a course and pray that will be enough to turn them into professional responders. Instead, return regularly to the activity of offering feedback, and talk openly about what kinds of feedback will be most useful at various points in a project.
Call “peer review” something else. Heather likes to call it “feedback.” When she has called the activity “peer review,” she has found students are more likely to gravitate toward line editing, grammar, or what folks in writing studies call “lower-order concerns.” When she stopped calling it “peer review” and started calling it “feedback,” students were more likely to offer “higher-order concerns,” focusing their attention on organization, quality of analysis, ability to synthesize literature, and strength of arguments.

We’d Like to Know: What time-saving methods have you used to respond to your classes once a project is under way? What methods of individual response have you found most effective for your students’ learning? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.
 

 
Originally posted at “Inside Teaching MSU” (site no longer live): Gomes, M. & Noel Turner, H. Lighten Your Load: Eight Ways to Make Individual Feedback More Efficient. inside teaching.grad.msu.edu