4/21/2019 Stith Synchronous Critique - Google Docs

Jessica Stith
ET 630
Synchronous Critique
31 July 2018
Background

The webinar I chose to view for this assignment was “De-Grade Your Classroom

and Create Mastery Learning with Narrative Feedback” by Mark Barnes, hosted by

ASCD. This webinar was originally hosted February 28, 2013 by ASCD and I viewed the

recorded webinar that was made available after the fact. When I began to look for

webinars for this assignment, I found only a few that were being offered synchronously

and many them were not on topics that I was truly interested in. There was one that I

wanted to check out, but it was offered at the same time as a doctor’s appointment, so I

decided I had to do an archived webinar. Once I made that decision, I really wanted to

find something that was about grading in the classroom. Every since the Seminar

course with Dr. Marcovitz, I have really been thinking about dramatically changing how

and why I grade things and this seemed like a good opportunity to learn more. After an

exhaustive search, I found this webinar. It was the only one that appeared to be aligned

to the topic I was considering and, although it was an older webinar, I don’t think the

material covered has changed in any significant way since the webinar was originally

offered.

I’ve participated in a number of webinars or synchronous online learning

experiences both as part of this program and as part of my district’s professional

development plan. This webinar was pretty typical of those that I have experienced

before. The webinar was essentially Mark Barnes sharing his slide presentation as he

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talked over the slides. Interestingly, you never see the faces of the hostess or Mr.

Barnes.

I was excited about this webinar because I am truly interested in the content and

wanted some actionable tips to use as I plan this year in my classroom. However I feel

like this webinar was more focused on the reasons why you shouldn’t use grades or

should try alternatives rather than what those alternatives might look like--which is

where my interests were. He did talk about narrative feedback and introduced his model

for narrative feedback: SE2R (Summarize, Explain, Redirect, Resubmit). I thought his

model was interesting, but I don’t think it goes far enough for my purposes, which is

something he alluded to but didn’t expand on.

Objectives

The stated objectives of the webinar were that participants would:

● Understand the problem with grades

● Learn effectiveness of feedback over grades

● Learn multiple ways to supply feedback.

These objectives were clearly posted on an initial slide and explained by the presenter

at the start of the webinar. The webinar accomplished these objectives, although I would

argue that the last objective wasn’t specific enough. He showed multiple ways to supply

feedback in that he explained different platforms you could you, not that there were

different types and kinds of feedback to supply.

Interest, Engagement, and Interaction

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The recorded presentation didn’t allow for participant interaction other than two

polls and a chat box. As the chat box was not viewable in the video, I’m unsure how

much it was used during the webinar. However, at the start of the webinar they

encouraged people to post questions or comments to the box that they would read and

answer. I didn’t see that happen at all during the webinar, but there was a ten minute

question and answer session at the end and in that session they did use the chat the

box extensively. The two polls were used in what I would call the motivation section of

the webinar. Participants were encouraged to vote to categorize two different learners

and/or their grades in a couple of scenarios.

I found a bit of the webinar to be repetitive and I think the host did as well

because he quickly went through some of his slides saying that we had already covered

that information. I didn’t think this was a boring webinar, but I didn’t find to be particularly

engaging either. Most of the interaction with the participants happened either at the very

beginning or during the question and answer session at the end.

There was no participant sharing of best practices or strategies that I could see

and there was little sharing at all in that respect.

Communication

This webinar effectively communicated the reasons why we should consider

alternatives to traditional grades and some of the ways that the host uses narrative

feedback to support his students. As I said before, most of my reservations about the

content in this webinar were related to what I understood the topic to be rather than

what was presented.

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Technical Management

This was the area where the webinar could use the most improvement. Although

I can’t know for sure, based on things the host said, I believe he was screen sharing,

but didn’t actually “host” the meeting. This meant that at various times he had to verbally

ask the person who introduced him to start a poll. The other issues were kind of

technology 101 issues. At one point there was a lot of background noise which made it

harder to hear him, there were popups that came up on his screen from his email

account, and there were notification sounds. At one point I believe there was also a

ringing phone. It’s unclear how much experience this presenter had with using

technology in this way, although he did stress multiple times that he’s very

technologically savvy and uses it extensively in his instruction. None of these issues

were great impediments to the transfer of knowledge, but they were annoying to me.

Curriculum Connections

There was very, very little connection to the Community of Inquiry Framework in

this webinar. When I evaluate the webinar through that lens, there is some evidence of

teaching presence both in how the host presented himself and in how he designed the

webinar itself. There was no observable opportunity for participants to establish either a

social or cognitive presence other than some limited questioning in the question and

answer session at the end of the webinar.

This webinar did incorporate some elements of the R2D2 model. The main

portion of the webinar fit the “reading” component--delivering the content of the webinar

to the participants. There were a couple of “doing” elements in the polls which asked

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participants to evaluate different student scenarios. There were no formal opportunities

for either reflecting or displaying, although I did some reflecting on my own as I viewed

the webinar. I would add that I think it’s difficult for a traditional webinar to fully

incorporate either of these models, though I think this one could have done a better job

than it did.

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