Giving Positive Feedback- Tickled Pink and Green for Growth

Distinguishing between learning and performance mode

Last term we focussed upon narrative writing. So to make sure that their knowledge has reacher their long term memory, I gave them an writing prompt and allowed for discussion. The prompt was "I ran to my Mum and my clothes were all wet"..... I gave the prompt and then allowed discussion. Well, I couldn't stop them from talking! Ideas were flying! And not only were ideas flying, they also reminded me about the strategies required to write a narrative!

We are learning that there are many stages to writing.

1. Getting our thoughts down

2. Editting

3. Publishing

The first stage is a stage that most students are competent with. The second is a little trickier. But we are allowing students to read one another's work and to edit using the strategies, does that sounds right? look right? make sense?

The conversations happening involved the students actively helping one another and discovering that editing is not only vital but also fun.

Tickled Pink and Green for Growth: I also use these strategies to help students in being able to edit quickly. Using a pink highlighter to emphasise amazing effort and a green highlighter to show where growth is required. Typically it was mainly to see that full stops were used in the incorrect place and capital letters were missing. But they were able to tell me that. So once they edited their work, I sat with individuals and conferenced their editing. We had a great time looking at how they can change their "green for growth" and laughing about how they had missed these items.

Enabling individuals to grow in confidence is a passion of mine and to see growth in confidence just makes my heart leap with excitement.