Last year in precalc, everyone presented. (If you solved a problem, you had to present before you could turn in a paper, and the only way to earn a grade was to turn in papers. Publish or perish, baby.) But the audience often sucked. The crowd would wait politely without really trying to follow along, then clap politely and go back to what they were doing. Of course, that didn’t make anyone very eager to present.
So this year in Algebra II and Precalc we’re trying something devised by two of my colleagues and me, based on stuff we learned about feedback from Mylène and Patrick.
Everyone gets a slip of paper to fill out for each presentation:
The questions correspond to the full rubric for presentations (the rubric shows up around page 5).
The goal for the audience is to ask questions of the speaker in order to help the speaker score all YESses—without doing it for the speaker.
Everyone fills out yes/no sheets and turns them in to teacher. Teacher reviews quickly and that day or next gives general feedback to group about their sheets: “Didn’t seem to me that you guys could actually check the steps in Sam’s presentation, but you said you could.” or “Here are 5 samples of comments you wrote for Lianne. Which ones are specific and which are not?” Teacher gives sheets to speaker.
Any troubleshooting you wish to offer prior to launch will be greatly appreciated.
Work in Pencil 
Interesting and definitely something with potential. In order for the slips not to be perfunctory, however, you might need to cut back on the q’s that can be answered yes or no without providing explanation or evidence. That is, at least a few should require the observer to give an example of how the presentation improved understanding, etc.
But that aside, putting some onus on the audience to actively help the presenter hit all his/her marks without actually “doing it for him/her”? That makes a lot of sense to me.
Thanks Michael – I updated the post above to include the actual slip, which does require students to elaborate on 3 of their yesses and nos … but the balance may be out of whack. Maybe we’ll put only 3 prompts on there at a time and require specifics for each.
I’ve tried some things along these lines, and will keep trying. Thanks for sharing these thoughts–they’re helpful.
One thing that might make for better feedback is to “distribute” the feedback prompts among the audience members, so that each person is only answering a couple of questions. Different questions on different slips. I think it’s likely too much to ask students to be evaluating their peers on all these criteria *and* to follow the presentation. Giving each audience member just a few criteria to focus on will make them more attentive without overburdening them. That should make their feedback more concerted and less perfunctory. Besides, the presenter doesn’t need pages and pages of feedback–just some feedback that is thoughtful.
That’s what you made me think. Hope it’s useful to you. It was for me.
Hi Dan, I’m looking forward to hearing how this goes. Is “giving good quality mathematical feedback” a standard in your grading scheme? Looking at this process, it seems like it could be.
A couple of thoughts struck me as I was reading, trying to imagine myself as a student. In the prompt where you ask “what went well, what could be better”, it wasn’t obvious to me that this was an invitation to elaborate on the criteria in the rubric. For some reason, by default, I was imagining that that was an invitation to comment on other aspects not covered in the rubric. If you’re asking people specifically to elaborate on the given criteria, you could possibly leave a little space under each item, then give a prompt that says something like “write in the boxes above to elaborate on two ‘yesses’ and one ‘no’.” That will likely cause some logistical issues at the beginning of the year, when students ask “what if there are no ‘yes’ answers?” and things like that, but that should get ironed out soon enough.
As in Michael’s comment above, I’d be tempted to substitute short answers (even one word answers) for checkboxes wherever possible — for example “state the question in your own words,” “Name the method the presenter used,” “What final answer did the presenter give,” “Check one step of the presenter’s work,” “how were the visuals helpful.” Otherwise, it’s so easy to “feel” like I know what the question is or like I could check their work, and then when pushed to commit to some words, realize I’m not sure.
Where you ask “Did the presentation help you understand the question,” I can think of a few things you might mean. Are you asking if the question was clearly stated? Or are you asking if the presentation deepened my understanding of the question itself, maybe by bringing insight into why it’s important?
I find that as my students get more comfortable with this, they start to really question why they have to restate what the presenter’s final answer is (or what the question is, etc). After all, doesn’t the presenter already know what their final answer is? I keep going back to the idea that the point here is to let the presenter know if they were understood — I might think one thing is the final answer when the presenter intended that to be just a step in the process. By the time this starts to happen, most people have already had an experience of being completely misunderstood, and it helps to keep track of that to use in discussion.
Will you keep copies of your students’ feedback for yourself? That’s one thing I wish I had done more (and in a more organized way)… looking back at what kinds of feedback students gave at various stages is really interesting, and helps a lot in showing examples of “best practices” or trouble spots.
How will you introduce this to a new group? Model it for them? Have them assess you and then compare their assessment to your own? Intro one criteron at a time? I was too disorganized about this last year and I’m trying to figure out a more systematic way to do it this year. The ideas above are all in the running — I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
As a 6th grade math teacher, I look forward to trying your slip. I think the ease of the yes and no responses will encourage my students to pay attention to the various parts of a presentation. With the 2 + 1 (2 positives/1 suggestion) response on the back of the paper, I think this has real potential in my math class of 50 minutes per period.
Just wanted to say I thought Ithis is cool, and I ally like. Justin’s suggestion too. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks all –
@Bowman, I like Justin’s idea too.
@Mylène – Great comments! More than I can assimilate at the moment! I’m going to get started slowly with this and see what the response is, but I’m going to keep referring back to your comment for ideas about how to deepen what I’m looking for from the audience.
@Michelle – Let us know what happens!
Related, and cool: John Burk led me to “this outstanding post by Kelly O’Shea.” It responds to all of the deficiencies in student presentations that have been haunting me. Definitely want to work it in.