The guest speaker, Trevor Mackenzie, came into our class to present on the topic of Inquiry. According to Trevor, the most powerful tool to facilitate growth in students is feedback. Effective feedback should be presented before marks are delivered to ensure that students actually take it in. Feedback should also be kind, specific, and helpful because it is meant to encourage student work. Practicing giving feedback with students improves the quality of both self and peer reviews because it sets an example and gives them the language to express themselves. Trevor accomplishes this by having a station with feedback prompts, for students to transition to doing this process independently.
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A powerful lesson I took from this presentation is the idea of co-construction where if you as the teacher find yourself doing something for a student that they should be doing for themselves then you should be doing it together. I think this is very important because as teachers we don’t want to burn ourselves out, so we should be checking ourselves not to be working harder than our students on their own assignments. No matter how much we may want to help them, they can only succeed in the long-term through self-efficacy. Scaffolding co-construction entails setting success criteria for students to move towards self-assessment.
Trevor also emphasized how curricular competencies, such as promoting thinking and communication, should always be the priority over specific content. He achieves this in class through strategies like Vertical Learning where students participate in more dynamic ways than simply receiving information from a lecture.