 Hello, hello, and welcome to PD and your PJs. I'm so excited to be here with you to talk about making feedback, your focus with CISA. I'm here with Arthur, and he'll be talking in just a few minutes. But before we get to the good stuff, I want to tell you that you should hear me talking now. We are recording our session right now, and you will receive the recording in an email shortly after we conclude. The best part, though, is that we will share the slides. So you'll get to look through those at your own convenience later and click on some of the resources and take a closer look. So those will be coming your way shortly in just about two hours. Quick introduction, I'm Julie. I was a high school ELA teacher. And as Arthur is as well, so we have a lot of things in common. I'm now on the teacher community team at CISA. If you can, go ahead and give me a follow on Twitter. I'm at EdTechJulieJ. I share lots of ideas and resources about CISA. And then, of course, you can connect with our whole team on Twitter at CISA. Now, I do want to tell you that what Arthur's talking about tonight is not how to create a class or how to get started with CISA. So if you're in need of that sort of information, please find it at ideas.cisa.me. And as always, you can check out the upcoming webinar schedule at web.cisa.me, backslash pd's. I just have one quick favor I want to ask you before I turn it over to Arthur. At the end of our session tonight, you're going to see a survey pop up on your screen. I would love to have some of your feedback. We really value it, and we use it to make our PD sessions better. So just take a minute to answer the questions. It only takes about a minute. And then as a bonus, we do draw one t-shirt winner at random every week from those responses. So complete the survey for your chance to win. OK, Arthur, I am about to change it over to you. How's it going? It's going great. Thanks, Julie. Glad to be here. Thank you. I can't wait to hear what you have to say. All right. OK, I'm kind of playing around with this. Welcome, everyone. I can't hear you apparently, but I'm going to just keep talking. And then every now and again, I will ask Julie if there are any questions. Can everyone see my screen at this point? I can't see it yet. I have a message on my screen that says, waiting to view. OK, hold on. How about there? Not quite. Let me see if it's coming. If not, I can definitely. Oh, here it is. We got it. You're good. OK, it looks like it gets kind of loading up a little bit. OK. All right. Everyone see that? Yes, you are good. I'm going to mute myself, Arthur, and then just let me know if you want to take a question or I will let you know if we have anything pressing to say. OK, my name is Arthur Caravelli. I am a co-founder of Teachers Going Greatless. You can follow me at hhscaravelli. That's my high school, has a high school. We have a website at teachersgoinggreatless.com. And we have Twitter chats, actually, on Sunday, 9 to 10. Every other week, we're getting a Spanish chat, actually, that's going to alternate starting this weekend. You can also find us, Teachers Going Greatless, on Facebook, so I'd love to have you follow us in those couple places so that you can follow up on some of the stuff here. We're going to go really fast. Not used to doing this, so 30 minutes is going to go really fast, but I will occasionally pause and give you a chance to ask questions. I think a really good idea to do right now, and I'm going to pause here for a moment, if you would, just open up another tab and get this URL. If you could take a second right now so that you can follow along. There are a lot of resources that I'm going to open up. You're welcome. I'll go there personally. You'll see them on my screen. But if you would take a second just to open up the session page right there. OK, I don't know if you're done, but I'm going to go ahead. Anyways, I want to get us started before I introduce myself a little bit more. I want you to think about this. What comes to mind when you think about grades? And if you're feeling, especially tech savvy right now, if you would go to a poll everywhere right now, kind of as I introduce myself, again, I'm having you put a lot of things in, and I hope you're getting there in time, and I'm not annoying you by going too fast. But I'm going to take a look at this here in a second. Oops, get out of the way. Please get out of the way there. If you could text 37607 to Arthur Keara at 135. And I'm just curious to hear from you, get a little bit of feedback as to what comes to mind. When you think of grades, maybe you're dealing with grades right now. I know parent-teacher conferences are going on right now for a lot of us. It's going on for me this week. And I'm just curious, what comes to mind when you think of grades can be just a word, can be a sentence, can be a phrase? OK, I am going to move on here. OK, a little bit about me. I have a very large family. This is my family. I have eight children. This is up in the UP, the upper peninsula of Michigan. And we always go to Jim and Yanni. So if I have any Michiganders out there, hello to you. We always try to get our one family photo, basically. And as you can see, it's kind of choose your own adventure here with our children. But they range from age to someone who's turning 16, Grace, all the way down to Zalea. I'm not even going to name all the rest of them, because it would take too long. But anyways, they are my life. And part of the reason why I've gone grade-less actually is in part because of just how time consuming, ridiculously time consuming, everything associated with grades is. And that is one of the reasons why I have gone grade-less. So I'm going to jump over right now, hopefully. Let's see if I can do it. Go over to this. Did it work? Did anyone actually do any no responses yet? OK. So I guess that didn't work, Julie. Are you getting any questions on your end? I actually am not. But listeners, feel free to type a question in the question box. Arthur's going to stop here and there. And he can take a few. So if you have them at any point in our session, feel free to type them in. OK. And I'm just going to go ahead. Yeah. So I wanted to start out. First of all, I am the co-founder of this group. The teacher's going grade-less. And I want to talk a little bit about that, actually, because PSISA has allowed me to do some of the things that I do and has allowed me to go grade-less in a certain way, such that people kind of know what's going on in a richer way than you would have in a traditional grade book like you see here. So I want to give you, first of all, definition of grade-less. First of all, it could just be grading less, limiting the impact of grades within the context of current constraints. So that would just be kind of toxic grading practices like one-shot assessments, 0s on the mathematically disproportionate 100-point scale, 0s for plagiarism, 0s for other behavioral things that are just going into that academic grade, blurring that academic grade, and really being quite punitive to students. The other thing is without grades. And that's avoiding the damaging and demotivating effects of grades entirely. And there is a spectrum between these two things, whether you're grading less and finding ways to kind of not focus on grades, put the focus on learning. And then actually, many of our teachers really don't grade at all throughout the term and then have conferences. Many of us do need to enter a grade ultimately, have a conference later on in that term, where the students will kind of compile some evidence and we'll have a conversation about that. Another key to this is it's going. So you don't need to jump right into the deep end. I think a lot of us started by grading less and limiting the impact of grades within the current constraints. OK, so a couple ideas here. Dylan William, one of the main people kind of helped us to think about this, which is this quote from is the feedback you're giving students helping or hindering. When teachers pair grades with comments, common sense would tell us that this is a richer form of feedback. But our work in schools has shown us that most students focus entirely on the grade, the letter grade or the score, and fail to read or process teacher comments. Anyone who has been a teacher knows how many hours of work it takes to provide meaningful comments. That most students virtually ignore that painstaking correction advice and praise is one of public education's best kept secrets. Joe Bowler, I also teach math or I have taught math and she is kind of in the math realm. We now know that grades and test scores demotivate. And there's lots of research about this. Rather than motivate students, they communicate fixed and damaging messages to students that result in lower achievement in classroom. So any of us who are interested in engendering a growth mindset in our students, grades work against that, scores work against that. Okay, so what's the point of portfolios? Portfolios can play a role in this. And here's a nice quote. The portfolio is a robust substitute for the rigid strictures of the traditional grade book, a flexible structure for teachers who desire to de-emphasize grades in favor of feedback, revision and growth. And I said that. So why go gradeless? Actually, I'm sorry. I apparently have some duplicate slides here. I'm gonna jump down here to seesaw. So the question is what role can seesaw play in all of that? And I have a few things that I'm gonna go over as quickly as I can. I'm gonna stop every now and again and give you a chance to kind of chime in and have a question if you need one. First of all, it's kind of setting up your class. As Julie mentioned, I'm not gonna show you how to get all of seesaw set up, but I am gonna talk about a couple things that will help you in terms of going gradeless. Self-assessing work. This is critical, encouraging self-assessment with your student. That is one of the more powerful things that you can do when you move away from grades. Providing feedback. See, saw really puts you in a very good position to do that as well. And then finally, conferencing for a grade when you have that portfolio that you can come back to, you really can put together your best evidence and you can kind of have a nice conference there. So first of all, setting up your class. If you build it, they will come. And I have a quote here from Larry Ainsworth where I want one of the things to think about when you're doing this is really prioritizing standards. You shouldn't have the whole common core in your seesaw. And I am kind of a standards-based person, but I have definitely prioritized standards. So prioritizing the standards has nothing to do with lowering the bar and everything to do with focus. It is about less being more. The difference is in the degree of focus given to certain standards over others. So what I do is one of the things you can do in seesaws you can set up folders. And I have, actually there's, you can attach standards and Julie probably wants us to go with that premium version where you can attach standards, but actually you can use folders to have students kind of put their artifacts into the appropriate standard. And you can see some of the ones that I use, these are in my English 12 class that kind of get them a nice rainbow order, alphabetic order. I'll go over here to my seesaw and kind of show you what that looks like. If it loads, okay, I'll just click on this. And you can see I'm actually in AP now. And I set up folders and students whenever they put things in their seesaw, whenever they add something to their seesaw, they are prompted to file it in its appropriate folder. Okay, so this is something that you can set up within seesaw. Let me see if I can show you that would be over here with our little managed folders. And you can create folders here. And you can see I have many items in these folders, but these are folders that students can reference, especially when they're going through that self-assessment process. Okay, so I think that that's a nice little process you can set up. Let me get out of here. And actually you can show add to folder step is an important thing to have both students and teachers should be able to do that. Okay, Julie, are there any questions? I actually don't have any, Arthur, but I love what you're saying about folders. Your demonstration is really good as reminding people how to do that in their settings in seesaw. So that's really helpful. Listeners, don't forget, you can type in a question in the question box and Arthur will answer it for you before we wrap up tonight. Yes, indeed. Okay, one other thing that I kind of help students do and we're kind of ramping up for the exam. So please don't hate on me for the fact that we're doing a lot of the same things. We are really kind of doing a lot of this is how to read a poem, how to read a prose prompt. We're doing a lot of the same thing. I kind of keep people on track a little bit by pushing this out to them and letting them know what kind of artifact it is because they have a choice as to, you know, how they're gonna enter this in. Many of them are taking photos. And I really like that. I'm gonna show you something I do with that a little bit later on. Have a due date, any learning standard or standards. Many, many, many times I have them include the hard copy, actually turn that into me. But I like to have that one artifact, maybe that best page that they really want to talk about when they self-assess. Okay, moving on to encouraging self-assessment, know thyself. This is, I think, one of the more powerful things that you can do with CESA. And we have this quote from Susan Brickart, student self-assessment satisfies both motivational and achievement needs. Students who can size up their work, figure out how close they are to the goal and plan what they need to do to improve our in fact learning as they do that. And continuing on here, carrying out their plans for improvement not only makes their work better but helps them feel in control. And that is motivating. This process called self-regulation has been found to be a characteristic of successful motivated learners. And here's another quote. Why don't students develop those traits of self-assessment? It's because our total monopoly on assessment feedback and grading has trained them to adopt an attitude of total passivity in the learning process. That was me again. Okay, so one of the cool things you can do with CESA is you can have them kind of take notes of make note of cool things that they're doing. And they can do that through their comments obviously. And many things I have them just self-assess and kind of talk about how they are making progress in response to feedback here. I'm trying to get them to notice things that are gonna be helpful to them on the AP exam as they read. And so this student actually bought the book and is writing directly in the book and is sharing some of that with me so that can have targeted feedback with her. Similarly, we have this guy kind of thinking about some progress that he's made doing the open prompt is one of the prompts that you have to do on the AP English Literature exam. Actually, one more thing about this is you can see that I've done audio feedback here down at the bottom. And that is my favorite type of feedback that you can do through CESA. I am not a huge fan of rubrics and I like to give that individualized feedback. I definitely let people know some of the standards that we're striving for. I like that to be something of a dialogue. I definitely know a little bit what quality looks like but rubrics I feel actually have not helped me that much to encourage students to develop as writers. And this is Linda Maybury who talks about this phenomenon which is really just all over the place at this point especially with the assessment of writing through tests. And she says the standardization of a skill is fundamentally self-expressive and it's standardize the teaching of writing which jeopardizes the learning and understanding of writing. And so instead of that, I'm just gonna give you one other thing that I kind of do here. Actually, I wanna say a couple more things. What else, equity, some questions of equity. When you have a rubric, well, not every kid is necessarily going to see themselves in that rubric. Not necessarily going to see an opportunity for self-expression in that rubric. And David E. Kirkland was right here at Michigan State University, has since moved on to Northern New York University. He says, we tell young urban kids that their identities don't matter. We tell them that the way they see the world doesn't matter. The way they construct selves within the world doesn't matter. But not only do we negate those identities, we criminalize them, we vilify those identities. And he says, so it's much more than ignoring, it's more than discounting. And I underline that because of the counting aspect of that, the grades and the scores really related to that. When I follow those same young people, the burgeoning identities outside the classroom, they're reading and writing in complicated and beautiful ways, yet in ways that we fail to recognize in value. And in part, I believe that's because we come to the table with a lot of preconceived notions about what mastery, what really demonstrating those skills would look like. And I think one of the cool things that we've had a chance to do is students were able to demonstrate skills of oral literature, characteristics of oral literature, ancient literature involves alliteration, parallelism and repetition. And we had an amazing rap that actually featured a lot of people who for whom English is not their first language. And many of these raps actually were in that first language. And because I can hear repetition and parallelism and alliteration whenever I hear it, I'm able to assess that. But I feel like in part that's because I've moved away from grades, because I've moved away from rubrics. And I don't need this objectivity that we have sort of a consensus around. We can kind of open it up and value those funds of knowledge that students bring. Okay, another thing that I do is I do keep an exemplary, kind of a warehouse of exemplary student work. I'm just kind of continually adding to these folders right here. And I will occasionally post this shortened URL just to say, look at this exemplary student work. Let's see if we can imitate this. But not only that, I am continually adding to it. So if we get a better understanding of something, I'm open to that. It's more of a two-way street. And I'll give you a chance to kind of look at that yourself because we're kind of already bumping up against the clock here. But anyways, I just copy the pictures that students have uploaded into CSOT. It's great, I don't even need to snap pictures of exemplary student work. Students are posting it themselves. And I'm continually sending them to this folder, depending on the standard that we're working on to get some ideas about what that exemplary student work looks like. Okay, providing feedback, gonna move through this. Don't be a martyr because feedback can get pretty intense as Carol Jago says, you're reading as fast as you can but the pile of unread essays grows and taller and taller, guilt mounts. Students want to know when their papers will come back, rating begins, consuming all your energy, your weekends, your life. And I think many of us, especially English language arts, teachers know what I'm talking about. I've also been a math teacher and it can get pretty hectic there as well. And here are my children and here's one that I hadn't seen up to the last moment there. But this is a very common scene for me and part of this is having a better balance. You know, what I found out, I think the thing that allowed me to make a change was when I realized that this sort of backbreaking level of feedback was not good for me but it was also not good for my students because again, it was that monopoly on assessment and really giving students a chance to do that. But when I do provide feedback, I love providing verbal feedback with CESA. I can talk faster than I can write and I'll show you where you can do that. I do screencasts with Screencastify. I have a letter to class method that I developed based on Dr. Todd Finley's idea. And again, I post exemplary student work for students to look at in CESA. I'll regularly kind of just post something that I thought was pretty good and I kind of give a student a chance to really shine with that work and other students can kind of see whether or not their work is measuring up. As you can see, I am doing some verbal feedback. Oh man, this thing keeps getting in the way. I'm gonna not move. But the cool thing that you can do with your comment is you can either type a comment, you can do a text comment, but more often than not, I actually record a comment and you only get two minutes. And thank you CESA for only giving me two minutes because if I had more than that, I would probably go much longer. But I think what it's taught me is to make that feedback count. Make it about two things, make it about three things. Give them one thing that they can work on. I think it's also had me do more targeted writing assessments instead of big, huge writing assessments. And if I do a big, huge writing assessment, I'm focusing in on small things so that I can actually give them that targeted feedback. Now I'm gonna have a chance to really show you this, but Screencastify does a really good job of this. It produces, I basically will record your screen as you are talking about a student paper. And I have linked to this video, but you can see I'm down here in the corner. I'm looking at the student's paper and I'm scrolling through it and I'm giving them this very high quality feedback as they listen. Okay, it looks like I might have lost a slide there, but here's one other thing that I do is I'll post exemplary student work. If I see some exemplary student work, by the way, I didn't stamp this photograph. That was a student photograph and I just took it. And I cut off the name and I posted it because it was awesome. And I wanted students to kind of see what had been done here. And you can see many parents are taking a look at this as well. And I feel like we are building our understanding of what the AP exam wants. And this is the main thing to take away. And actually, it looks like I'm gonna probably have to stop at this before we have time to talk about conferencing, which is a very cool topic in and of itself. This is Dylan William again. The main thing with feedback is that the students do something with it. Okay, and you can see students are listening to my feedback and what do they do with it? I simply have them write it at the top of their next attempt. And so they have a couple of things that they're gonna work on because I have not given them a whole ton of things to do. And they are gonna make steady improvement throughout the year, just hearing that feedback and not getting any grades, but just getting that feedback that they pay attention to because they're not distracted by the grade. I'm gonna jump down to the end. We're not gonna have time for this. Great things that you can do here with CSaw and conferencing for a grade. You can check that out yourself. Maybe it can do that at a future webinar or get better at doing this so fast. Here's my information again, Julie, do you have any questions that have come up? We actually do and we have a few compliments as well. And I love this topic so much, Arthur. It's really thought provoking and I appreciated all the resources and quotes you include too. Okay, so here's a couple of things coming in for you. Joe is writing in from Australia and she is asking for a reminder. Do you have your settings in CSaw set so that students see each other's work or are you just posting the exemplary work and they don't normally see each other's work? Yeah, I do not have it so that they see each other's work. We have a personal narrative at a certain point because they're seniors and they're doing these college essays and they get kind of personal. And so we actually close it down after maybe the first week of school. And if there is something exemplary, I will tag everyone. And so I can do that. I crop the picture so that the person's name is not visible because I don't want them to get razzed for having an awesome paper like they sometimes do. But I just want them to see what was great about it. Okay, thank you for that clarification. And then Ladonna is writing in and she's telling us what her takeaways were from this webinar. She said she really appreciates the idea of using the folders and she says she's gonna use the assessment and the artifact sheet for her students. So that's a good bit. Oh, great. Thank you. We can take a couple more minutes. So don't hesitate to type in a question. If you have a question or some feedback for Arthur, feel free to type it in. Joe, I can also tell you that I was teaching high school seniors and I also like Arthur did not have them viewing each other's work. So when we were collaborating on things, we were doing that in some other digital spaces like a Google Slides or Google Docs where they could work collaboratively but in CSaw they were not seeing each other's work. Okay, I have a couple more things coming in. Do you use the CSaw blog? Do you use the blog and post your exemplars there? Every now and again I did. I did a lot more last year. I found that now many people visited and I always was forgetting to tell them to go there. So I just found that I feel tagging everyone, posting something to the stream, to the journal and then tagging everyone seems like it gets more traffic that way personally. Okay, that makes sense. Kathy's also asking about the folders and that's kind of a technical CSaw question. I wanna remind everybody that if you're kind of looking for some how to type information from CSaw about folders, I mean you do the folders by clicking the wrench or some people call it the spanner in the upper right of your CSaw class and that's where you turn on those settings or enable those settings. But you can go to help.csaw.me and type in the word folders and then all of the resources we have around folders will come up and that will include some PD type videos for you. Let me read through and see if we have anything else coming in. Joe is saying that she does like your idea of tagging everyone but the class itself is still like private and students aren't seeing each other's work. So she appreciates that as well. Okay, and Kathy's gonna go to ideas and look at more about folders. Well, Arthur, this was so helpful. We don't have a ton of questions coming in but I like that they know where to reach you if they want to contact you, communicate with you on Twitter. I think that'd be great and I would be excited to have even more webinars on this topic or even subtopics like the conferencing that we really ran out of time for. I think this was great and as a high school ELA teacher this is really, you're speaking my language here so I loved it and learned a lot and I would love to collaborate more and talk with these folks more too. So I wanna remind you where you can find us, you can tag us in anything you wanna say tonight about this webinar at CISA. Arthur's Twitter was up on the screen a minute ago and then of course you can find me too. Yep, at EdTechJulieJ. I love this, I love this topic, I learned a lot and I hope all of our listeners did as well. Thanks so much Arthur, I hope to be back with you again soon. That sounds great Julie, thank you very much and thank you for everyone who came. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.