A solution to comment writing dread: video reflections
Writing comments/reports whatever you call them, it’s something many teachers dread—for many of us it involves writing thousands of words, doing hours of work, knowing they won’t be read for a week or more until after you write them, and in some cases, wondering if they’ll be read at all. I often find myself struggling to understand the audience and purpose of these comments—should I direct them to the students, or to the parents? Are the formative or summative? Sometimes, I feel like I’m trying to speculate about a student’s motivation or a cause for his or her actions. And even when I write my very best comments, I’m not sure I’m giving a student’s parents the clearest picture into what a student is learning in my class.
Here’s what I’d like for my comments to be. I’d like them to be part of a conversation. I’d like for students to have some input into to content of their comment. I’d like to give them specific feedback and advice on how to improve, and I’d like to emphasize and highlight the things that the student is doing best, and to have a clearer picture of what’s motivating the student.
Here’s an idea I had after my latest 20,000 word comment writing adventure. Why not ask students to make a video reflection before each comment writing period? I think I could ask each student to compose a 5 minute video showing me 3 things:
- Show me an example from your work that shows strong understanding of a physics concept.
- Show me and example from your work that shows improvement in your understanding of physics.
- Show me an example from your work that shows a concept that you are still working to improve your understanding.
I could then ask students to comment on their work and study habits, goals and more. What I find most useful about this is that like screencasts, I think this video would paint a clear picture of that student in my class. Students who are doing well in the course would present clear and specific answers to the three points above, which vague responses would be one more indicator of struggle.
My comments could then be written reposes to these student videos, which would allow me to enter a conversation with the student and make specific comments on the understanding demonstrated in the video. Maybe one day, my comments could even be videos themselves.
So what do you think? At 5 minutes a video, it would take an hour and 15 minutes to watch all of the videos for my class (assuming I didn’t watch them at double speed). This seems like a reasonable investment for significantly improved comments.
I’d welcome any thoughts or suggestions you may have to ease the comment writing process.