Collaboration vs. Institution

I loved this view of collaboration, let the people who are using the information take responsibility for creating, posting, storing, labeling, etc. The comment about the programmer who came up with only one idea really hit home. It is a little of a quality vs. quantity argument. However, as a classroom teacher, this definition of collaboration would frustrate me. When we design collaborative lessons, the purpose is for each member to have a job that needs to be done. It is definitely more of the institutional definition of collaboration, and group members get very upset if they are the ones doing the 80% of the work while another member only does 20%. So...how do we reconcile the two?

Feedback That Fits

I am aware that this blog post is a week late - I'm trying to catch up from having a very sick little boy.

I really connected with this article. I have a daughter who was on the receiving end of ineffectual feedback last year. She kept getting a B on her writing assignments, with no indication of what she had done well or what she needed to improve on. When she would ask the teacher, she was told "just keep turning in quality work". When I went to the teacher and asked her to define "quality work", she could/would not. My daughter is a very hard worker and takes her grades very seriously. If she isn't getting an A, she assumes it is because she has missed something, or done something wrong. Therefore, she wanted to know what she needed to work on in order to improve and was given no constructive feedback at all. I was concerned for the other students who really needed a lot of help, how would they improve at all?

The quality of your feedback is incredibly important to the success of the child in the future. You need to make sure that feedback is focused and specific to the learning targets (especially for those students who are even farther behind) in order to focus the efforts on specific areas of improvement. Fortunately for my daughter, most of her teachers have been significantly better at providing this type of feedback.