IB Hong Kong Conference 2019

Developing self-regulated learners through teacher research and innovation

Rationales

KIS International School, together with the KIS community, developed a 5-year strategic plan which runs from 2015-2020. One of our goals is to further develop the programmes to support and meet the needs of all students in preparation for them to be proud of themselves and their place in the world. We have identified two objectives in reaching this goal:

1. Further develop visible learning (Hattie, 2009);
2. Further enhance assessment tools and strategies to support and promote student progress and ensure student are assessment capable learners.

In order to develop self-regulated learners, we know we want to involve students in taking more responsibility for their own learning and become assessment capable. Professor Hattie’s research emphasizes the learners’ engagement with the feedback process and its role in developing assessment-capable learners who are able to regulate their own learning. Hattie notes that developing assessment capable students who know the learning intention for what is being taught can describe where they are in relation to the success criteria and can then use that information to determine the best learning strategies to improve their work and performance is the number one factor for improving student achievement (Hattie, 2009). 

These insights have led me to reflect on our feedback process with our students as well as the reporting process. 

• Students do not see the value of formative tasks.
• Teachers spend many hours giving feedback and students are not always engaged with the feedback received to move forward for improvement. The workload of teachers often causes burnout and has an impact on their well-being.
• KIS reports four times a year. In March and October, narrative reports are issued. The feedback on the narrative report cards has not always been useful to our students and parents because it is summative rather than formative. Students have not had an opportunity to construct meaning from the feedback to make subsequent improvement.
• The language used for narrative reports is usually academic and based on the published MYP assessment criteria descriptors, which makes it difficult to decipher. The feedback is inaccessible to some students.

With this in mind, I invited a group of teachers to work with me and launch the formative feedback project in an effort to foster self-regulation. We worked with only grade 10 students and teachers in our first year (2017-2018), and the result of the student improvement was significant. The participating subject was English language and literature and students were measured against MYP Year 5 criteria for grade 9 and 10. Students were taught by the same teacher in grade 9 and grade 10. I compared their grade 9 and grade 10 English achievement levels, and the result in the second semester in 2018, after one year of piloting, showed great improvement. In the same year, I also followed the same process to provide students feedback for their personal project reports, our students’ average grade of their personal project reports compared to the IBMYP worldwide average grade was remarkable. 

The result gave us lots of confidence and we decided to invite more teachers in participating in this project in the academic year of 2018-19. We did not really know how it would actually work in our first year. We were lucky to have an excellent English language teacher, she worked effortlessly trying out different ways to provide feedback and making time to conference with students. After one year of piloting and observation, I came up with a model to support teachers in testing out the feedback practice and hope to conduct action research to test the viability of our ideas. I am very grateful to work with a group of talented and passionate teachers who are risk-takers and want to test a new feedback approach to make an impact on student learning.  

The aim of this action research project is to investigate how implementing a systematized formative assessment and feedback process model can engage students proactively with feedback and simultaneously promote teacher agency. It is a communication framework that promotes teachers and students being intentional, fostering craftsmanship, and developing collaborative partnerships. Intentionality, craftsmanship, and collaboration are the cornerstones of development. It is a process that involves learners with inquiry, action, and reflection. The diagram is presented below to visually illustrate the feedback model proposed.

Through this project, we hope to cultivate a coaching culture by providing actionable feedback through frequent formative assessment and fostering positive and collaborative interactions between students, colleagues, and parents. The Feed Up, Feed Back, and Feed Forward system developed by Professor Hattie will also be implemented to develop student assessment literacy and encourage them to reflect critically for personal development. Questions are designed to engage students in thinking critically about their learning, monitoring development, interacting with feedback, identifying strategies and actionable steps in order to reach their desired learning goals.

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Interactive formative feedback process

In the interactive formative feedback model,

1. Teachers collaborate and design summative assessment that allows students to demonstrate their conceptual understanding, knowledge and skills of the unit.
2. Next, teachers communicate and explain task-specific clarification to students. Exemplars of different achievement levels are provided to help students understand the task requirements and expectations. Teachers can also co-construct task-specific clarification with students.
3. Teachers consider the nature of the summative assessment and assessment objectives, and they design a series of formative assessment tasks that provide opportunities for students to practice knowledge, concepts and skills required for the summative assessment.
4. After teachers communicate the learning targets with students, they interpret the task, refer to task-specific clarification, and set desired learning goals.
5. Students perform the formative task and receive feedback from their teachers. Teachers provide feedback based on the student’s learning goal by using the GRIT framework. They point out positive attitudes and growth that students have demonstrated. They also note down any risk-taking behaviors observed. Moreover, they make their judgement of what students need to improve and then provide tactics (strategies and/or resources) to guide students to regulate their performance. Teacher feedback can be communicated through dialogue and other modalities.
6. Students construct meaning of the feedback received and clarify with teachers. Lastly, students use the feedback received to develop actionable steps that can help them to complete the summative assessment with success and confidence.

Unpack assessment criteria

Presentation

Where to next

• Continue to reflect and revise the process
• Our action research plan received the grant from EARCOS and we will formally conduct this action research in the year of 2019-2020.

Templates

The resources included are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. In short, you can copy, distribute and transmit the work, but you must attribute the work to KIS International School. The work is not for commercial purposes.  

Resources

References