Austin’s butterfly can be seen here
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Video transcript
okay tip number four please jump okay tip number four um is how to get them writing and peer assessing with group critique now do you remember what group critique is you know what group critique is no no you do you remember years ago we went on a course me and you our friend john selleck um and it was run by howell roberts yeah this is now ringing a bit of a bell yeah yeah and he he talked about um there was an educator in the u.s called ron berger remember and he showed the video of this thing called austin’s butterfly oh yeah and it’s one of those things isn’t it you’ve probably had a million sounds before but it’s absolutely brilliant i’ve shown it to my department like people in departments are like in tears how moving it is but do i just give a quick quick moment so austin’s butterfly is blonde goes into a elementary school in the us and the students are tasked with um drawing a butterfly or creating the most lifelike image of a butterfly so he gives them the image and he says this is what it looks like and go away in your groups and and produce you know the best version you can and this lab austin goes away and instead of drawing what he should be doing he draws the icon in his in his brain of a butterfly which is just like a child’s version of a butterfly like you would expect and he goes up to the teacher and he says there’s my butterfly and the teacher says well it’s not quite what we wanted to be and so he says can go go away and have another go but when you go away have have your friends around you to try and guide you to try and give you some feedback specifically about what you can do to improve and it the whole the whole of this critique uh protocol that he comes up with the key element is being specific in your feedback so the teacher takes with a back seat the teacher facilitates the room um but the students in the room are critiquing each other’s work so when austin was there he he had a goal and he gave him a bit of a bit of background on what he should do to him to improve it uh he went back to the teacher and he said well it’s a big improvement well done yeah you’ve you’ve made it look a bit more like this image and cut a long shorty short he goes back a number of times and he produces like picasso or something not picasso that’s a bad example because it would have been all over the place but um darling let’s say darling um so a very good piece of art anyway and and what what was really powerful was it showed him the two images where he started and where he ended up and they were paul’s a party he produced some amazing work but the thing that was most powerful for me was the teacher did nothing the teacher took a back seat and it was the the students who gave the gave austin that specific feedback now when i when i saw that i thought that’s brilliant but in realistic terms you know if you’ve got a class of 30 you can’t just choose one kid every lesson and just have one go at something so that with that i thought okay that it’s a good idea and i said very powerful but how can i utilize that and what the idea that i came up with was um using group critique so getting students to assess each other’s work in the class but not necessarily just focusing on one one student so what one day i remember um an ex-colleague of mine used to be obsessed with using wallpaper in the classroom so walk in with a bit of wallpaper and the students that you’re going to redecorate or something but you roll you roll it out onto some desks so you pushed all the desks together you roll it out and the kids are looking at you going what is going on here so straight away they’re inquisitive they don’t know what’s happening so it’s something different so you roll it out onto the desk and you explain to them just like in austin’s butterfly that you’re going to show them um a piece of work and that what they’re going to try and do is try and produce something of a similar quality so in languages for example i might give them a 90 word written task and say right this is what a good one looks like and what we’ll do is we’ll put it on the board and we’ll spend maybe 10 or 15 minutes discussing it and saying okay well why is this a good piece of work and we’ll dissect it and we’ll discuss together and as we’re doing that i’ll make notes on the board and i’ll say okay well it’s um it’s got three different tenses it’s got opinion phrase and i’ll make a big list and the students will be able to see that list and that’ll be visible throughout the whole lesson and then i’ll explain to the students i’ll say okay well now we know what a good one looks like we’re going to have a go ourselves so you sit the students down and and in facing the wallpaper so either side of the wallpaper and they’re writing directly onto this wallpaper and you explain to them that over the course of the next maybe 15 20 minutes they’re going to write their own piece of writing so you give them the task to do and you’ve got the the exam the example are on the board as well to help them and you say right have a go at this task now straight away because and what you do is then you explain to the student okay well in a minute what what’s going to happen is you’re going to move around and you’re going to look at someone else’s work and you’re going to give them some feedback and that feedback has to be kind it has to be helpful and most importantly it’s got to be specific i want to explain that to the students that they’re going to get feedback from someone else in the room straight away they’re like oh god i’m gonna have to make this good i’m gonna have to make this as good as i possibly can so straight away they’ve got pride in what they’re doing whereas if you give a written task half of them will just be like well just i’ll just do two lines here and that’ll be it so immediately you’ve got you’ve got that buy and it’s similar to what i was saying before about the buy-in for the um for the league idea and so something different going on so they know that they’re gonna um they’re gonna be giving feedback from their peers and what i’ll do is i give them some some post-it notes so once they’ve they’ve written their piece of work get them moving around the room look at someone else’s work and leave some some feedback on the on the post-it notes the one thing that when i first introduced it i thought okay what i’m going to have a bit of an issue here when i’ve got really able students and a weak student is marking their way because there’s obviously going to be a bit of a disparity between what this the able student knows and what the weaker student knows but then i console myself in the fact that we’ve just discussed together what a good one looks like so we all know the criteria that’s involved here and that’s why i said before really importantly you have to leave that on the board so that when they’re going through it you can say well actually you’ve not included a past tense here when we just we decided that a past tense was necessary to get to a grade nine you need you need a past tense here and so it it worked in that way and but i said before the beauty of it was that because the students knew that other people were seeing their work they talked they took real pride and ron berger talks about an appetite for excellence i think he calls it an ethic of excellence i think he’s got a book called ethic of excellence where he mentions that it fosters his appetite for like his appetite to succeed and to do well and be willing to redraft not that’s the key so what the students then do is when when the feedback comes from their peers they go back to their original piece of work and just like austin did with his butterfly they they should be willing to redraft it not accept that their first attempt at something is you know the final version it’s really interesting this way so first thing i’ll say is there was a period of about four years where every insect i went to austin was either wheeled out or that you remember that monkey where they’re playing basketball and a monkey comes and waves it was that one or the other and but but you’re right there’s definitely something in this i just want to dig a bit deeper into this because it’s not something i’ve tried before and a lot of these what i really want to do on this tips for teachers is interview people from lots of different subjects who have lots of different experiences and trying to think will this work for mine and and will it work for maths and english teachers watching and so on so let me just dive into this a bit more i’m really interested in what you said there that they the kids will take more pride in it because they know someone in their class is going to look for it that that definitely rings true if you’re handing it in to the teacher okay fair enough but isn’t it yeah it shouldn’t be that way around right yeah at all yeah but that that definitely i could i could see that definitely being the case i’m interested in the what two aspects of this imagine the first time the kids are giving the feedback it’s quite a challenge for them even though you’ve done the modeling on the well you’ve given them the kind of criteria on the board and so on how did you get around that do you kind of if you see a really good piece of feedback is it a case of all right stop everybody have this is an example of good feedback how do you kind of upskill them in the feedback given yeah it is a bit there’s a bit of training involved i think it’s not just doesn’t just happen you know with the first time you do it well i said before with it with a number of other those other ideas that i’ve given i’ve given today if the students are used to doing it they know what’s involved but i would just be walking around the the wallpaper and just looking what they’re writing and just saying well maybe look at that line there what do you think they’ve maybe not done there just dropping little hints and tips as you go not giving them the answers um but if we you know you you know when you know your class you know he’s going to give give some good feedback and it’s it’s another model of excellence isn’t it it’s another if you can exemplify and and and show some good feedback then you may as well shine a light on it and subscribe with the class and being willing to stop the class and so actually this this error that someone’s made here whilst it’s an error it’s a brilliant error to make because there’ll be a really big reason behind it or you know because in the in the exam criteria it says that you need to ensure that you are using the perfect tense or whatever it might be and this student’s not done that so it i say it it’s getting them getting them trained up a little bit in terms of that the protocol and but what was really surprising for me whenever i thought it is that i said before the protocol for that ron begets talks about is be kind be helpful as those first two the students are always kind and helpful but never they’re never sarcastic or anything like that they you know they obviously want to mark a certain person’s work if they’re threatening their friend or whatever and well you can just ask just to move along one seat or whatever if you want to avoid that um but i was really really surprised how helpful they were and how considerably aware of not only the other person’s feelings but just wanting them to get to the next step and improve their work um but yeah so check out austin’s butterfly if you’ve got you’ve got a spare five minutes uh one more question on this from me mate is and it’s alluded to something you’ve just said there i i can see this working really well once you’ve got that kind of clustering now making the class norms where we are confident sharing our mistakes we’re all in it together and improving so on but you could also imagine some other classes where that dynamic isn’t there and kids don’t want other kids looking at their work and knowing it was them and so on is there ever a case for anonymizing the work here or in your experiences are always better to to the kids know who’s work they’re feeding back to well the kids don’t put their names on anything so it’s you know unless you’ve unless the students have remembered exactly where the other kids have sat it’s it’s totally anonymous so you might again you might know that the handwriting maybe and the whole idea is that you just mark in a piece of work right and it it works if it’s a big class as well you can just you can say like anyone on this side of the room you’re going to be looking at a piece of work on this side of the room and i i haven’t encountered an issue with it as yet um but it obviously it’s something that you might need to think about as well um but i i just in the past i just had positive feedback from the students how much they’ve enjoyed it and how because i’ve used it before we do it do a writing task so just to get them to fraction that was the whole purpose of this tip was to get them right and sorry because sometimes boys especially struggle with just putting pen to paper but i said before if they know that someone else is going to look at it they’ll have a go brilliant