How to stop spending hours writing report card comments:
1. Give students ownership of their own assessment
2. Have students reflect on their own strength, challenge, and next step
3. Have students create videos, reports, recordings, etc showcasing their strength, challenge, and next step with examples (examples at bottom of page)
4. Share it with parents
If you know any teacher's in Manitoba, I am sure you have heard many complaints about writing report card comments.
My biggest complaints about report card comments since new regulation came into play 4 years ago is:
1. They are extremely time consuming to write
2. They are filled with teacher jargon that the majority of parents don't understand anyway.
So I decided to stop spending hours writing beautiful comments that no one but me and principal will understand.
Instead I put my students in charge of their own comments.
I know I'm not the first teacher to try this, and in fact I have tried it in various ways over the years but was never happy with the result and found it to be more work in the end.
*Disclaimer: This will only work in your classroom if you currently bring students along for the assessment process. If students are already building criteria and reflecting upon their work, this will be a breeze. If not... well maybe start.
Here is how I did it.
First you have to sell the idea to the kids. I asked them about their report card experience with reading and understanding the comments. I heard back from them exactly what I thought. They barely read them because they made no sense. I agreed with them and told them how I think they are a waste of time. They loved this! (Aren't teachers supposed to love all things boring?!?!) So I told them that I wanted to bring them into the secret world of comment writing and let them have control of their comments. I remember one student in particular, who can be rather oppositional, was beyond thrilled that a teacher was finally trusting him with his own learning. It was like they were being let into the secret world of teachers.
Obviously I needed to teach them the expectations of the government of Manitoba on how to write a good report card comment. A discussion was had regarding how to write a strength, challenge, and next step and how they needed to connect to curricular outcomes.
The following document is what I had students fill out. They made connections between curricular outcomes and the criteria that was set for each assignment and then self-reflected on their understanding in each area.
After they decided on their comments, each student was required to have a conversation with me to see if I agreed. The honest answer is that there were maybe 3 students out of 65 who were not aware of their strengths and challenges. This was so cool! Our students are the best judge of their learning. They know where they tried and where they struggled.
The next step is the fun and best part. Students then created videos (or if they had other ideas of how to do it I allowed that) where they talked about their strength, challenge, and next step. They had to show evidence for each as well. Some students create Oscar worthy performances, others did a simple speech. It was totally up to them how they wanted to showcase their reflection.
I know you're still wondering...yeah but you still don't have comments ready to go! You're correct. While students created their videos I walked around to each student and did a voice-to-text document using my iPad, where students told me how they would like it to be worded. They then approved it and I moved on to the next student. Engagement in the movie making process was high and I didn't need to worry about behavior while I was getting the comments written.
Once all videos were done, students uploaded them into our classroom Seesaw. This way parents had the opportunity to view them and students could view and comment on each others. The comments created beautiful support and conversation between my students.