Closing the Gap

28th January 2014

Critique and Closing the gap

I've been reading quite a lot of information lately about the importance of feedback, closing the gap and allowing students the time to act on feedback.  As a department this is a weakness we have especially with regards to Key Stage 3 units of work.  Although the marking of units is often very specific and has targets for improvement; we rarely give the student a chance to act on these targets.  Often this is a case of "time"  and plodding through the unit and then marking the whole unit at the end.  Over the past year I have been trying to implement ways of changing this and enabling students to act on certain aspects of the unit before the project has finished.   One success of this was with a Year 9 class who were in the middle of a project and writing up a report. I asked the students to mark the report and where they were on the SOLO ladder. The class were then given a SOLO self assessment rubric with examples on each level of the SOLO ladder and had to use these examples and key phrases to close the gap in their learning.

Chris Hildrew wrote a piece recently about a CPD session he delivered on Closing the gap and this seemed to make everything a lot clearer but it's how we "close the gap" that counts.  Tom Sherringtons' blog post "Making feedback count: Closing the Gap" makes it clear that when he visited a school NW Essex (who recently received an astonishing OFSTED report, Outstanding in every detail) to take part in a CPD session on "Closing the Gap" although this is a whole school approach every department are given the freedom to develop the concept and all departments developed different methods of doing this. What they had in common was they focused on recording student responses to feedback; and closing the gap was as important as the marking. For example, using specific marking criteria the students gauge where they are at with a piece of work and then with feedback of some sort whether this be self/peer/teacher use this to close the gap.

When trying to develop something similar for our department I was also reading about "Critique" and Tait Coles explains this excellently in his post "Critiques - it's a culture thing" which also includes a full video of his CPD session that he delivered at TMClevedon.  In his write up it is clear that he is trying to develop a culture which enables the students to learn to critique each other's work in formal lessons but then have informal critique sessions that happen regular between students which will then take critique to the next level. 

Everything so far will have no effect unless we give time for improvement. We are very guilty of produced excellent feedback and targets but giving the students no time to act on this feedback which is a pure waste of out precious time.  This leads to DIRT (Dedicated improvement and reflection time) developed by Jackie Beerie.  Alex Quigley has a very informative post on DIRT and why it is a quality model that goes hand in hand with feedback. Essentially DIRT is about having the highest expectations of students and them having the highest expectations of themselves.

With all of the above in mind I tried to work out what was best for our department and not give staff extra work but have the highest impact.  So far I have come up with:

• I have tried to amend the marking criteria so this is as specific as possible for students and staff and incorporates all the knowledge and skills that students will have a chance to develop.

• Students can then use this marking criteria to assess where they are and what level they are working at before the end of the project.
• At the end of the marking criteria there is a section for critiquing work.  I believe this will be best by self critique as each student will know what aspects they have covered without having to print everything off.  In this section I have tried to incorporate key criteria and examples of what they may do if this criteria is not met.  The idea is for students to critique their own work and annotate in detail what they need to do improve, in other words feed forward. While this is taking place the teacher can help individuals with their critique where necessary.
• DIRT is then implemented and students spend the next lesson and homework acting on the self critique. This will mean all students have individualised targets and the teacher can help individuals with skills or knowledge as this is taking place.
• This essentially will help every student " Close the Gap" with regards to their level and all students should have made some improvement. Students will also independently want to achieve what is they need to do In order to move up the learning ladder, I imagine this will stand out most with those with a high engagement in learning.

An example of the marking criteria and the Critique guidelines are below.

Year 9 Krakatoa Project and VB

The task was to :“Design an interactive multimedia product to present to users information about what happened to the volcano Krakatoa and its effects”. To produce a small quiz using Visual Basic for users to check their knowledge.  The audience will be students in Key Stage 3.

You will be using Informative writing to tell the reader facts about the volcano. To enhance the presentation you will be adding images, video and animation.  These will be created by yourself or edited.

Questions to ask yourself when critiquing your work.

1.     Does the animated banner look professional? is the pace of transition appropriate does it flow correctly, can all text be read? If NOT how could you improve it? E.g. do you need  to change frame rates, apply onion skinning to help it flow more appropriately?

2.     Are the images suitable for presentation? If NOT what can you do to enhance them? E.g. not use a thumbnail, use more advanced tools to edit the images such as adding text, using layers, using advanced tools in Serif PhotoPlus.

3.     Is the movie suitable and interesting? E.g. could images be edited more to enhance the movie, are they suitable images, Have you included Title slides, text and credits?

4.     Have you followed a suitable house style? If NOT what can you change to make it more professional? E.g. have you used only 2 main colours, is the font all the same style, is the master slide set up correctly to keep consistency?

5.     Have you set up the slide show appropriately? Do the buttons work? If not what are you going to change? E.g. have you the mouse click off so that the slide will only move forward when the buttons are clicked/ Have you included an exit button?

6.     Is the content as informative as it should be? If NOT what extra information can you add? Is there enough information in the content to help them answer the questions in your quiz?

Questions to ask yourself when critiquing your Quiz/CODE.

1.     Does your quiz tell the user if they have the right or wrong answer? How can you make sure this happens?

2.     Have you used predefined Visual basic code to make a professional interactive quiz? If NOT can you attempt to use the code?

3.     Do your questions match the ones you originally created in your presentation? If NOT how are you going to edit change the questions? E.g. Can you edit the given code so it reflects the questions and answers you want.

4.     Have you added extra questions of your own using visual basic and using custom buttons or comment boxes? If NOT how are you going to add the extra code? What extra code will you add? E.g. Do you have to create your own sub routines for each questions?

5.     Have you tested your code? If NOT how are you going to do this? How have you refined your work to ensure it works correctly?



The point of the questions is to help students provide a critique that is helpful, specific and hard on the content.

I am aware students may not be willing to be hard on themselves but this is something that they can be conditioned to do especially when they see the gap closing in their learning.

There are no doubt a lot of people who have other opinions of this and I would appreciate any feedback or guidance.  Please feel free to leave comments below and I will post about the results or effect this had after the lesson.  Hopefully it will be worth it!

Thank you to the many below who have helped me along with this post and links to some great material are below:

Chris Hildrew - http://chrishildrew.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/closing-the-gap-marking-twilight-cpd/

Tom Sherrington - http://headguruteacher.com/2012/11/10/mak-feedback-count-close-the-gap/

Tait Coles - http://taitcoles.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/critique-its-a-culture-thing/

Alex Quigley - http://www.huntingenglish.com/2013/10/12/dirty-work/