Possibly one of the greatest burdens on English teachers is the marking process. Now I’m not playing the sympathy card, but the nature of the responses generated by our subject means the output from students can often be conceptual evaluations written over three, or more, pages. Getting mathsy, multiply that by 30 and you’ve got a big marking task ahead.
Whole class feedback has done well to help with this workload and move us further towards the #goals of students engaging in their own feedback. We need students to combine the feeling of belonging being fulfilled by their teacher’s pen in their book with their executive function kicking in when they produce work to allow them to reflect, adapt and plan forwards.
However, when we give ‘two stars and a wish,’ do we actually move them on after the feedback so they are making links and developing metacognitive cycles? Wouldn’t they have done the wish the first time if they knew how? Do we ever actually pull apart the skill once we’ve powered onto the next unit of work? Could we dream of students working back and forward around the curriculum linking skills between units of work?
Enter the Closing the Loop book. Driven from a Head of Faculty with a request; a conundrum about progression and a need to make workload realistic it has been developed to combine feedback, modelling and forensic planning to provide the narrative of a class’s progress over time.
The Closing the Loop process works with every part of the metacognitive cycle to help build fully rounded learners who can reflect on their progress and articulate their areas of strength and weakness which hopefully support the cultivation of strong executive functioning.
The space to Feedback on work highlights areas for development and the FeedUp box shows areas of strength. The additional part of the ‘marking’ is Feedforward: the key to moving students forward. It encourages you to explicitly plan and share with students where you will revisit the particular weak skill over the next phase of learning, then the modelling page gives you space to re-teach and clearly show how to approach the skills. Over time you are documenting the story of the group’s learning over time all in one place.
I’ve got evidence it even works for Maths too!
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