I think the idea of each teacher getting an overview of other teachers' comments on a class is interesting. The example of written feedback on a Year 5 child's piece of work puzzled me. If this feedback is given to the child to read and process I'm not sure it would be that effective. Judging from the quality of the child's writing I wasn't convinced he/she would completely understand the feedback let alone be able to act on it. In my experience much of the written feedback that appears on primary phase children’s work is there to show accountability. I can recall reading extensive comments on FS2 work and wondering for whose benefit it was actually there. The head's, parents', Ofsted. Definitely not the child's. I'm as guilty as the next teacher of spending significant amounts of time writing what I thought was meaningful advice and uplifting encouragement. I think what needs time spent is going back over a piece of work as a class and focusing on the aggregated strengths and weaknesses. I'm unsure as to whether that would be the intention of this tool or not.
However, we've also realised that it is quite hard to wean people off of individual written comments. So a tool that can provide the performative comments very efficiently at the same time as providing teachers with a more useful whole-class analysis would save time and help students improve.
I think you're right that many teachers almost measure their own effort by the amount of time they spend on comments. I think also that parents still place a value on the teacher's written comments in their child's books. Certainly in primary phase, I can speak for secondary. Whether the parents read the comments is another matter but when they are looking through their child's books at a parents' evening it's evidence that the teacher is marking to work and acknowledging their child. Whether the comments positively influence the child's progress isn't the issue I don't think for the parents. It's knowing the teacher is marking the work, if that rambling thought makes sense.
thanks for this Daisy, very interesting and smart application of LLMs. I'm interested in the actual output of the feedback, and wondering how it would be used in the classroom or to drive improvement. for example, where the AI gives the feedback it appears to
Categorise the feedback by area and if it is a strength/weakness
Summarise the feedback
Give an example of where a teacher has given that feedback
What it doesn't do is say what it is the student actually wrote that merits that feedback. So if, for example, I wanted to see a specific case of a student "over-relying on dialogue without enough narrative description" I would have to go looking through transcripts for that. As a teacher then, I'm not 100% sure how to deliver this feedback.
An education organisation doing proper, thoughtful and useful work, using AI as a tool not a human replacement. As Engelbert envisioned a long time ago - augmentation not replacement. I do still wonder about your organisation name though - even more so in light of this particular post.
I think the idea of each teacher getting an overview of other teachers' comments on a class is interesting. The example of written feedback on a Year 5 child's piece of work puzzled me. If this feedback is given to the child to read and process I'm not sure it would be that effective. Judging from the quality of the child's writing I wasn't convinced he/she would completely understand the feedback let alone be able to act on it. In my experience much of the written feedback that appears on primary phase children’s work is there to show accountability. I can recall reading extensive comments on FS2 work and wondering for whose benefit it was actually there. The head's, parents', Ofsted. Definitely not the child's. I'm as guilty as the next teacher of spending significant amounts of time writing what I thought was meaningful advice and uplifting encouragement. I think what needs time spent is going back over a piece of work as a class and focusing on the aggregated strengths and weaknesses. I'm unsure as to whether that would be the intention of this tool or not.
I would agree that a lot of written comments for individual students are more performative than useful. We have written about this extensively, eg https://blog.nomoremarking.com/whole-class-feedback-saviour-or-fad-5c54c463a4d0 and here https://blog.nomoremarking.com/can-chatgpt-give-feedback-12d3b736eba9 and prefer the whole class feedback approach.
However, we've also realised that it is quite hard to wean people off of individual written comments. So a tool that can provide the performative comments very efficiently at the same time as providing teachers with a more useful whole-class analysis would save time and help students improve.
I think you're right that many teachers almost measure their own effort by the amount of time they spend on comments. I think also that parents still place a value on the teacher's written comments in their child's books. Certainly in primary phase, I can speak for secondary. Whether the parents read the comments is another matter but when they are looking through their child's books at a parents' evening it's evidence that the teacher is marking to work and acknowledging their child. Whether the comments positively influence the child's progress isn't the issue I don't think for the parents. It's knowing the teacher is marking the work, if that rambling thought makes sense.
thanks for this Daisy, very interesting and smart application of LLMs. I'm interested in the actual output of the feedback, and wondering how it would be used in the classroom or to drive improvement. for example, where the AI gives the feedback it appears to
Categorise the feedback by area and if it is a strength/weakness
Summarise the feedback
Give an example of where a teacher has given that feedback
What it doesn't do is say what it is the student actually wrote that merits that feedback. So if, for example, I wanted to see a specific case of a student "over-relying on dialogue without enough narrative description" I would have to go looking through transcripts for that. As a teacher then, I'm not 100% sure how to deliver this feedback.
We'll consider how to address this in future iterations.
An education organisation doing proper, thoughtful and useful work, using AI as a tool not a human replacement. As Engelbert envisioned a long time ago - augmentation not replacement. I do still wonder about your organisation name though - even more so in light of this particular post.
Thanks!