When we consolidate our math lesson, a Gallery Walk is a great tool to use to help get students thinking about the math that they see, and the math that they don't always see. A Gallery Walk is also a great way to get students using Descriptive Feedback with their peers to help give specific and clear feedback to each other on ways to improve and "edit" their work prior to handing it in.
A few weeks ago I was at at SIM (Schools in The Middle) Session. During the sharing portion, the Toronto Catholic Board shared with us an example of how one teacher is using Gallery Walk and Descriptive Feedback Effectively with her students.
In this first post it note, you can see how Megan is getting some feedback from her peer that is not really going to help her improve on her math thinking - But more on her presentation skills. Before the teacher hands the work back to the author, she first writes comments down to the student providing the Descriptive Feedback to help them improve on giving feedback.
The teacher is very specific in the feedback that she gives to the student. She tells them exactly how to improve by saying "Comment more on the math than how they talked." Then she gets the student providing the feedback to think more deeply about what they wrote "Why were the titles proper? How do you know?" She then returns the work to the student and allows them to rephrase their original feedback.
You can see now how Megan is able to see exactly what she needs to improve because the peer providing the descriptive feedback to her has done the "good" job on a different colour post it note. Now the feedback to Megan says: "The titles were proper because they are of the polygon properties and the polygons are all sorted properly." The only thing missing in this descriptive feedback is something to improve upon - However, learning how to give effective descriptive feedback is a process, and the students in this class are well on their way to learning how to not only give each other appropriate descriptive feedback, but also how to accept descriptive feedback from their peers.
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