Session Summary: ABP Teaching Tricks + Tips
On Thursday April 1, BEL+T hosted Session 2 of ABP Teaching Tricks + Tips with specific advice for Giving students (quality) feedback. A big thank you again to Anna Hooper, Dhanika Kumaheri, Joel Benichou and Katie Skillington for sharing some great strategies.
Log into the ABP Teaching Canvas Community (https://catalog.lms.unimelb.edu.au/browse/communities/courses/abp-teaching) to access the slides that were presented, and a summary of the highlights.
The session started with us remembering what it was like to be students! Anna, Dhanika, Joel and Katie, each described a memory of ‘receiving verbal feedback’ as students. The stories reinforced how vulnerable students can feel about receiving feedback, and how negative feedback can impact wellbeing. The take-away message was for staff to consider how tone, mannerisms (body language), choice of language and structure of the feedback can affect what students gain from the experience.
During Q+A, the group shared lots of practical ways of giving verbal and written feedback. The highlights included:
- The Love Sandwich for structuring feedback. It involves focusing on three clearly defined examples of 1) What has worked well to build student confidence; 2) A weakness to highlight areas for growth; and 3) Suggestions for next steps to avoid the student feeling discouraged and procrastinating.
- The Animal Game for encouraging peer to-peer feedback. It involves randomly assigning each student an animal, then defining how each category of animal will give feedback. For example, the mammals need to focus their feedback on compliments, while the birds need to suggest areas for improvement.
- Marco Polo to support comprehension of student ideas and staff feedback. It involves staff summarising the key points of a student’s verbal presentation, to give the student the opportunity to provide clarity. Then, after the feedback is given, the student summarising what their feedback was, specifically what the ‘next steps’ are.
- Feedback Library to enable staff to give high quality written feedback in a way that is time efficient. It involves staff keeping a typed recording of general comments (with relevant links) which they can cut-paste-adapt for individual student submissions.
Session 3 of ABP Teaching Tricks + Tips will focus on Strategies for ending the semester well and we held on in Week 10 (Thursday 13 May at 2-3pm: Zoom link to follow). Anna, Dhanika, Joel and Katie will discuss reflective practice with a specific focus on applying what you have learnt from teaching this in ABP this semester, to future semesters.
We hope you can join us.