Resuming fieldwork

Day 14, 20 April 2011
The reason why I enjoy the AR cycles is because it is practically not as linear as it looks. There I was moving to the 3rd day of cycle 1 where I had planned to implement a similar writing lesson that I had done before leaving for the conference. I went into the class with a new handout, but then some students came to me and asked if I had checked/corrected the drafts they submitted last week. Due to lack of time I couldn’t check those drafts. However, I decided to give feedback to them in today’s class only because if they revisited their work they would probably identify their own mistakes in a better way than before. So I quickly returned their drafts and asked them a list of questions that I had already prepared with the idea of checking/marking each draft at home. I read my marking criteria while they checked their work. Usually students are more motivated in doing something that offers them marks, but here for the first time I found them engaged in the task even though there was no reward involved. Hmmm, I still wonder what derived them…may be the fact that I told them that they will have something similar in the exam or because they realized it’s for their own benefit…I really don’t know. But there were clear signs of uptake of feedback as they asked me to repeat the criteria while they check and recheck their work. Since they sit in three wide rows of 7 seats each, I faced one row at a time while going through each marking criteria. I did notice that while I faced one row, students sitting in the other two rows would try and follow the criteria even though they’d get a chance to check their work later. Although I didn’t plan to give feedback in this way, but I thought I worked quite well both for me and the students. I think there’s enough food for thought for my next week’s lesson as I’ll be continuing with cycle 1, but I’ll be focusing on speaking skills again.