Pearl of Wisdom in Sydney

Bobby2
Community Champion
10
1774

Last week I was lucky enough to go to the sold out CanvasCon in Sydney. It was a great opportunity to: 

  • meet colleagues I usually only collaborate with online 
  • put faces to names 
  • swap stories and ideas 
  • meet a true Canvas rock star  @Renee_Carney   
  • soak up Canvas enthusiasm 
  • hear about what’s coming for Canvas 
  • celebrate what has happened in the last year 

 

So many gem-filled moments. But one little nugget has been on my mind a lot.  @jared  mentioned during his keynote speech how powerful Canvas is for self-assessment and self-adjustment. The penny dropped, I realised I have missed some golden opportunities with reflections and feedback. Opportunities where learners, and teachers, can take steps towards adjusting and improving even more consciously. I'm going to make that happen more often now. I'd love to know how others are incorporating opportunities for self-adjustment in their Canvas spaces. 

 

Thanks  @jared ‌ for the pearl of wisdom. I even managed to weave it into our workshop with the wonderful  @craig_nicholls ‌. Self-adjustment is something that I think needs to be talked about more. 

10 Comments
scottdennis
Instructure
Instructure

Hey Bobby,

I'm intrigued.  Would you can to comment or link out to more about self-assessment and self-adjustment in the context of formal learning?

Thanks,

SD

kmeeusen
Community Champion

Hi  @Bobby2 

I suspect, but could be wrong, that you have not attended many InstCons, but I have to add that  @jared  has always provided my favorite keynote addresses. Even better than the much missed Josh Coates. I tell folks that Jared is the voice of humanity in the EdTech world. He helps keep Canvas real.

Kelley

Bobby2
Community Champion

That's the thing  @scottdennis . A very quick google to help support my epiphany revealed - not much. So... I might have to do something about that. 

But in the meantime I know that teachers are doing their best to get learners to review their work, but I think we could do more to nudge them in the self-adjusting space. How will they make changes based on their review. This will maybe take place within the feedback loop, which I'm a huge fan of, potential within Speedgrader comments.

I use this a bit with teachers to stress the importance/impact of feedback  https://www.education.vic.gov.au/documents/school/teachers/support/highimpactteachstrat.pdf  John Hattie, a fellow Kiwi, will be so proud. 

Bobby2
Community Champion

And  @kmeeusen  InstCon is but a dream of mine. I stalk them from a distance, half a planet away. I'd like to have a beer with  @jared ‌ and chat more about this topic, and others. He did float past during CanvasCon in Sydney, but I was a bit too starstruck to strike up a rich self-adjustment chat. 

kmeeusen
Community Champion

 @Bobby2  If the opportunity ever presents again, jump on it! Really, he is one of the most approachable folks I know at Instructure. It sounds silly with such a young company, but he really is "old school" Canvas.

jared
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

No way! It’s you who are amazing. I just re-share your awesome stories (and am so grateful to those who let me do so).

Bobby, you totally should have said hi — I would have loved to chat, after hearing so much about what you are doing from afar.

Bobby2
Community Champion

Get ready - next time!

Bobby2
Community Champion

Now that I've got you  @jared  - are you able to elaborate on self-adjustment here?

jared
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Sure, happy to share some thoughts, though I am by no means an expert in this area.

First, it seems clear that students' ability to self-adjust is correlated with their academic achievement, and humans' self-regulation, in general, is predictive of success by certain measures. These may seem common sense, but of course the real challenge is how to develop this capacity in students?

In teaching and learning, I can share some of my own experiences trying to help students develop their ability to self-adjust. Most of it has relied on providing the appropriate level and quality of feedback on performance, followed by legitimate opportunities to perform again. Most of my teaching experience is in digital media (web design / dev), and is largely focused on demonstrable skills in a field where there are both subjective and objective ways of measuring quality.

For example, one of our desired outcomes was that web dev students would write simple, efficient code that would be easy to understand by others. In this course, students worked iteratively on a semester-long project, submitting new versions / expansion of their project week after week. In this particular week, the stated objective was to optimize their code. For a student who's just learning to write, say, CSS, optimizing your own code can be a challenge, since thus far they've been focused on just making code that works; you don't have much context for how professionals write code, let alone how your own code might compare. 

I could have simply provided all the feedback myself, but I discovered that not only was that pretty overwhelming for me (with 25+ students), it didn't always have the impact I expected. So I ensured that each student would do at least two of the following activities...

  • Compare their own work to professional examples that I provided -- this provided an easy, low-stakes introduction to some key ideas (1) there are many ways to do certain things, (2) we can learn from others, (3) our own work is never perfect and can always be improved.
  • Share good or bad professional examples that they have found -- this is a natural extension of the first task, but it asks students to apply their own, emerging critical judgment. It can also help them recognize their own biases.
  • Listen to feedback from peers -- on the one hand, this gave them feedback from someone other than me, and they seemed more willing to apply it with the mild social pressure that classmates can provide. This also sometimes required that students learn to discern useful from useless feedback.
  • Provide feedback to peers -- this is a chance for them to apply what they are learning from examples / feedback to others. Everyone has _something_ to offer to another.
  • Apply feedback from an expert -- i.e. the instructor. In my course, this happened after the other feedback processes, and almost always reduced the amount of feedback I would need to give. It also allowed me a chance to point to threads in the class feedback discussion that illustrated broader concepts or ideas.
  • Make improvements on their own before the next project was due -- having sufficient time and clear direction to apply what they've learned is critical. Holding students accountable to implementing improvements is also critical.

I theorized that a combination of perspectives plus a mix of observing/doing activities would deliver the best results. As you can imagine, this is a work-intensive exercise. As a teacher, I did have to sometimes choose to sacrifice time spent other, less important learning outcomes (e.g. history of web design, form validation) for those concepts with broad applicability that we really wanted students to go deep on.

This example seems pretty elaborate, but once I had it built out and supported by Canvas, it was actually fairly easy to manage.

And even though this example is skills-focused, some of the underlying concepts are connected to research that looks at the importance of corrective feedback in general, and even the importance of confronting one's own assumptions about a concept  (e.g. by comparing your own understanding to other people's perspectives, misconceptions, or misunderstandings -- I'm thinking specifically of Derek Muller's work in physics education).

Bobby2
Community Champion

Thanks  @jared  Nice Work

A thorough answer. And one I shall refer to quite a bit I think. I can see this working even in the K-6 world too. Make this an every day expectation, part of their rigorous day/week and they will be positively humming by the time they get to your classroom.