This week, I chose to comment on Brookfield’s Chapter 14: Giving Helpful Evaluations. Student evaluation and feedback is something I have struggled with throughout my career. While I have developed many methods of delivering feedback to students live in class, giving written feedback is something that I still find challenging. Nothing makes me procrastinate more than knowing I have marking to do. I will even clean my house in order to avoid marking, in a phenomenon I like to call “procrasticleaning” (and if the term’s inclusion in the Urban Dictionary is any indication, it is a pretty widespread phenomenon).

Source: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=procrasticlean

Why the resistance? As Brookfield puts it, “For those of us who wish to build collegial, supportive relationships with students, giving evaluations in one of the most difficult, demanding, and complex tasks we face” (2015, 185). There are so many layers of complexity to giving feedback: developing clear assignment criteria and robust marking rubrics so students know exactly what your expectations are, avoiding unconscious bias and favouritism, and even just being more mentally fatigued by the time you reach the last paper than you were at the beginning of the grading session. Giving quality feedback often feels daunting and overwhelming.

In addition to making my assignment criteria and marking rubrics more clear over the years (still a work in progress, I must admit), I really like Brookfield’s suggestion of providing specific examples of what you expect from students. For certain assignments, I have uploaded example papers from students who received a high mark in previous years. But I can see the utility of doing this for all my assignments, including weekly discussion forums. As a student myself, I always find that something clicks into place mentally if I’m able to see an example assignment. I’ve noticed that this is a widely used practice with the instructors in the Provincial Instructors Diploma Program, and it has certainly set me up for successful completion of assignments. As I learned in the Curriculum Development course, instructor transparency with students about course expectations is paramount to avoiding confusion, conflict, and even issues of fairness and equity.

So, I think I’ll put down the cleaning supplies and spend some time digging through old assignments to make sure my students know what I consider to be a strong example for each of my assignments. It’s a relatively small step that can make a huge difference to students’ experience and assignment outcomes. And who knows, it might even make giving feedback more enjoyable!

References

Brookfield, S. (2015). The skillful teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom (Third Edition). Jossey-Bass.