feedback | personal and social capability

Metacognition: Nurturing self- awareness in the classroom is a very thorough and well formulated article about how to help students reflect on their learning so that they gain insight and self-awareness. It introduces you to the concept of the Compass Advantage which is a very handy way of looking at how you deliver content and then get some good outcomes for the students. Dr. Marilyn Price-Mitchell argues a strong case for metacognition to aid self-awareness and learning:

Metacognition plays an important role in all learning and life experiences. Beyond academic learning, when students gain awareness of their own mental states, they begin to answer important questions:

How do I live a happy life?
How do I become a respected human being?
How do I feel good about myself?

The article offers a number of strategies for building self-awareness in students and so is well worth reading and considering.

In order to help change personal and social behaviour and achievement it is important to create a feedback loop where you enable decision making and get quality feedback. I have been trialling the ORID feedback and I have been impressed with the depth and quality of the feedback from students. Far superior to any other method. When you are teaching it is essential to engage students in a feedback loop. Create information and content, share it and then get feedback. That feedback loop is critical to providing better and more informed lessons where everyone is using technology and may be looking at content differently. So many people absorb information visually and so many people are using technology in a different way so each person’s strengths can become an asset in a classroom if you know what the strengths and learning gaps are. Getting good feedback means you have to have an organised and specific approach to getting ideas in a way that you can utilise them to construct better lessons. ORID is an evaluation tool which has some real strengths and which I have just reworked so it can be used in my classroom. I found out about it because it was in the recent newsletter from FacilitatorU. I have been subscribing to their emails for quite a few years now and they always come up with ideas which give me practical help to be a better teacher and to relate to my students in an effective way. Over the years their way of doing things has proven to be very effective when I have worked with groups. I used the life cycle chart from Microsoft Office to create my ORID feedback.