Corrective Feedback

I looked up Marzano on the net. I downloaded a PowerPoint presentation that he created and apparently presented to a school district. The theme of the presentation is increasing student achievement. It's a really long presentation, about 35 slides. At first I didn't see much that would apply to this class.

In a set of slides, he was apparently trying to drive home the message that the way rubrics are created are very important to helping children understand how they are being assessed. He was explaining the importance of providing "corrective feedback". To quote one slide he asks teachers to evaluate, "How effective am I when I provide feedback? When I provide feedback, to what extent do I believe that my students understand how well they are progressing toward specific learning goals when compared to a consistently applied standard, how much they have improved over time and how to improve their performance?"

The context of this was the teacher/student relationship but I can see how it also applies to the teacher/principal relationship as well. In my previous post I described how the school community is trying to implement change. If one looks at Marzano said in the context of the teacher receiving feedback from the principal on his or her performance, than it might be easier to understand why it is difficult for teachers to "improve" or in this case, change.

One of the most important steps to implementing change would most certainly be feedback. In Marzarno's example in his presentation, he said that just giving points in categories on a rubric with a comment like "good job" doesn't impact achievement. In this example then, a principal would have to provide specific "corrective feedback" so that teachers would know that they are progressing toward a specific goal. Providing effective feedback to the teachers as they implement the new writing program would help motivate the teachers to continue working toward their goals.

The teachers are not getting a very important form of feedback. This relates to the fact the teachers can't really see immediate change in their students' achievement. Because the teachers can't see any vast improvement in their students' writing, (that takes a great deal of time), they are not getting instant gratification about their instructional effectiveness. It was so much easier for them to know if they were doing a good job teaching a concept when they could grade a worksheet and see that their kids got all perfect scores. Watching students struggle through their first essay of the year couldn't be to gratifying.