5th Vhalar 717
"There's detailed feedback on each individual script," there always was. Faith very much felt that she had a moral duty to give her students the best chance to improve. However, having done this for a while now, there were things which Faith knew. "Cover your papers over, please. Yes, that's right. All covered." She smiled at them and then sat, perching on the front of her desk. "How many of you can tell me the grade you got?" All twenty students put their hands up. Faith nodded her head, not at all surprised. "Now then, how many of you can tell me what the first annotated point is on your feedback?" They knew by now how she wrote feedback. On their papers she wrote numbers on the side of their writing, then wrote a list which corresponded with those annotations.
Not one of them put up their hands. Faith was unsurprised by this turn of events.
"Sacha. Why do I write feedback?" Sacha, a mixed race young woman looked at Faith with a confused expression. "Do I write it for my benefit or yours?" Faith smiled at Sacha and she nodded her encouragement. "You write it for us," Sacha replied and Faith nodded.
Motioning to the whole class, Faith gestured for them to turn the paper over. "For some of you, many of you in fact, I have written the same feedback on the last two, three or even four papers. We are going to use the feedback I've given you to-trial and we are going to turn it into feed-forward."
Moving to behind her desk, Faith reached into the bag which had been a birth trial gift from Padraig. "I have here your previous papers, with my feedback on them. So, what you are going to do now is to look at each one. Any feedback point which I have made more than once, you are going to transfer into a list. The more often you get the same feedback, the more you need to prioritise it, so make a prioritised list. Begin." They all started to work, lowering their heads to see what they were doing. There were comments around the room, one young man looked up and grinned.
"You've written the same thing, almost word for word, on each of these." Faith nodded. Samuel was a good student, but he had something of a tendency to leave his reports and essays to the last moment. She spoke her feedback as he read it and, indeed, word for word. "Better planning will allow you time to proof read. Proof reading will negate minor errors which detract from academic style." He laughed and shook his head. "The thing is, Prof," Samuel, and quite a few of them called her that and Faith had found that she quite liked it. "I get you. I do. I'll try."
A number of them had comments which were repeated time and again and Faith moved around the class, discussing the lists with them. When they'd done that, she took the papers back in. "Alright, so now, you've got your list. That's fine, you know what you have to do. Pick the top two and work out a plan of action for how you could improve that with the last paper in a ten-trial period. Begin." Again, there was discussion, tips for improving different aspects, questions and comments. Faith had no wish to have a quiet classroom, it wasn't her way.
When they all had their plans, she gave them back the papers she'd returned to them at the beginning of the class. "Now, you implement. You have ten trials to improve that grade by at least ten. Any question?" There was a groan around the room, but it was good natured. However, Faith addressed it. "We are not theoretical physicists. We are not students of language or history. We are not philosophers or geographers. We do not have the luxuries that they have. If we are not prepared to constantly review and revise, revisit our work and improve it, then people will die." She looked around and smiled. "Besides. The second mark is the one which will count in your final scores." That, there was no doubting, was a good thing to the people in the room. Faith nodded and turned back to get on with the rest of the class.
These were all things that she would have to do, she knew. She had to prepare them for when they were writing without her. Practicing medicine, yes, but as students when she finished work because of the pregnancy she had told no one about yet. In a very real sense she was feeding forward.
