Learning from Mrs Sharma

Freya my 7 year old daughter has had a supply teacher (Mrs Sharma) for the last two weeks as her regular teacher is in hospital. They don't like Mrs Sharma. She is strict and 'shouty'.

On Wednesday Freya came home and was very excited to tell me about some praise she had received for a design she had done on the computer. She doesn't normally speak much about her work without prompting... but this time it was special - the praise had come from Mrs Sharma... and "she is REALLY hard to impress".

Today she had a sticker for a poem she had written. Mrs Sharma had given it to her. "And she is REALLY hard to impress, you know!!!"

Praise from Mrs Sharma, it seems is worth a lot more than praise from her usual teacher, because it is so hard won... the kids are not stupid.

So where does this leave the feedback loop? Is it advantageous to let students think you are 'hard to impress'? Does it make them try harder... or will it make some of them give up. I'm going to see if I can find anything about it in the texts.

Making the grade

I seem to have been grading solidly for about a month now so I guess it's about time I reflected upon the process. First observation is that since I haven't been blogging it's a clear indication that it's nothing I'm very excited about. Hard to get excited about the grades...but it's also a culmination of the work of the academic year so it's like an indictment or validation of the teaching.

Group research project

I was reasonably happy with this grading, but rather disappointed with the research produced. There is no one piece of work that I felt happy to send to the client. There is a candidate but I'd want some amendments.

The main frustration with the grading itself was around the groups that did not work well together, where I knew very well that some members had been passengers. There was a personal reflection element which I gave a value of 20% - this tended to make a half grade variance across the group.

I know there's a problem with students not picking up feedback at this time of year so I've offered to email the feedback sheets to them upon request - in addition to being available to collect hard copy. Let's see how many ask for it.

MKT1001 Exams

What a revelation. I helped to grade Grant's exam papers - did 50 and moderated another pile. By doing this I realised what an effective form of assessment this is. Grant did some helpful guidelines about what idea answers should include. Once I had marked a few it became really easy to sort the students who knew what they were talking about from the wafflers and inventors. No plagiarism or random internet sourced nonsense to worry about. It was also very time effective - 50 scripts in about 3 hours, and no expectation of individual feedback from the students. I can see why it's used on the big modules. Not a great learning experience for the students though I suppose. All for the convenience of the assessors.

Dissertations

Am less confident about the grading of these. The first one I looked at had some really complex data analysis which I didn't understand. It seemed really good. The student had been supervised by Kathy who is very experienced - it made me feel inferior as a dissertation supervisor. Most of my students ran out of supervision before they got to the data analysis stage anyway but even if they had, I wouldn't have been telling them to do T-tests or rotational analysis.

I feel quite responsible for the quality of the work my students did. Then I did a couple that were not so good - felt relieved!

Once I had second marked all of Kathy's, I marked the one of mine that I expected to be worst. This student had barely engaged and early drafts had been very poor - full of religious doctrine and personal opinion. I was pleasantly surprised - it still had major flaws but I think it's a pass. Also I noted that she had used sources and terminology that made it sound like she knew what she was talking about. Realised it's not all up to me.