The Importance of Feedback

As I looked back at my journey with this project, I realized I had not provided enough opportunities for students to talk about their work with people outside their peers and receive feedback on their progress. This blog post outlines one of the times I did provide that opportunity and delves into why this is such an important component with this type of work.

From March 2015:

As a cap-off to a great week of student-centered activities, a team of visiting members of Titan 21 came to our class to check in on the students’ 20 Time projects. My school is part of an initiative to bring more project-based learning into classrooms. The visiting team consisted of administrators, teachers, and an educational consultant from Advanced learning Partnerships, Amos Fodchuk, who has been spear-heading professional development for our school system. The students rose to the challenge. It was a typical 20 Time day with groups gathered in their favorite spots around the room working on their final leg of these projects. The visiting team spread out around the room and asked the students questions about their projects, challenges and triumphs they had faced, and how they thought the project time was impacting preparing for the AP Lit exam in May. I caught little snippets of the conversations and was impressed. Students were poised and confident. They shared their work from Sketch-Up models of a baseball field redesign to a website for homework help to a first aid app to a journey with random acts of kindness. I could not have been more proud. I think in the future I need to provide more opportunities for the kids to showcase their work. It infused a renewed passion for their projects and showed them how excited other people are about what they are doing!

Read the full blog post “Rorschach, Raskolnikov, and Titan 21 Visits” at Strawbabies and Chocolate Beer

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.