The debriefing is a powerful tool for teaching to which students readily respond. I have had students tell me they really felt they benefited from these activities.
In general, the debriefing is a lesson that consists of analyzing student errors and offering corrections. Naturally, this is done anonymously so as to avoid embarrassment. It is particularly useful in teaching writing, computer programming, and similar complex tasks that can be broken down into smaller skill sets for training.
For example, when I teach French composition, I select errors from student compositions and present them anonymously to the class. I explain the error, I correct the error, and students then proceed to practice recognizing and correcting the error themselves. Innovation has a number of these lessons for sale at one of our online stores.
By way of another example, when teaching social studies, I help students develop skills for analyzing historic documents using constructed response tasks. This assignment calls upon students to provide historical or geographical context for a document and then to analyze its reliability and relationships with other documents such as cause-effect, turning point, or to compare and contrast. Especially for the reliability element, it is useful to display student work, both strong and weak, for commentary and analysis.
If you’ll indulge a final example, when I teach persuasive writing I like to display student samples in class and we can practice together identifying claims, warrants, rebuttals, and so forth. We can weigh the strength of arguments and of writing style.
21st century learning spaces are designed to facilitate debriefing for all sorts of tasks. Since this is a key feature of my own teaching practice, it is really baked in to the Innovation platform:
- Multiple-choice: Teachers can start up a “live session” after a test to review. In the live session, the host displays the question and students join the session from their own devices and interact. (Kahoot! is a well-known example).
- Short Answer: Teachers can initiate a “live session” for short answer that works the same way.
- Jeopardy-Style Review: It is easy to select questions from a set of recent tasks such as quizzes or short answer prompts and then generate a Ventura game.
- Analytics: Innovation has a complete set of analytics tools for all online tasks. This includes multiple-choice and short answer item analysis, standardized (“curved”) grading functions, and statistical analysis tools to evaluate and compare assessments. Analytics tells teachers what to debrief; what has priority for review and remediation.
- Item Analysis: The test “master” for each assessment presents an item analysis of student work and a ready-to-display version of the test.
Debriefing lesson planning can be very arduous. It can be time-consuming to create a slide show or document with copy-pasted elements of student work submissions for analysis. The Innovation platform facilitates this in multiple ways with a few clicks, in true form to a strong 21st century learning space.