Grade Or Feedback?
Let us stop and think about what is our goal? What is the purpose of giving this grade or feedback? Is our goal to ensure students' learning or to evaluate them? Answering this question, all educators will prefer to be on the side of knowledge, not grading.
Hence, feedback is more beneficial for the students and the learning process; I prefer to give feedback with a second chance of assessing to achieve that goal: "success and expertise." While providing a grade for the student will be like a final judgment on that student, which cannot be changed.
Feedback is not only coming from the teacher to students; it could also be directed from the students to their teacher, which will be more valuable. In this case, the teacher will not need to dive deeper to know what each student needs because the feedback/reflections will directly tune that teacher to their students' needs and help them think about the next step and the requirements/ plans/ tools they have to do/use to cover these gaps. Here are some of the students' reflections from 3 periods/ classes:
After reading this feedback, my mind shifted, and I decided to include their misconceptions in a plan for reteaching and find another way of assessment. So, I only retaught the second question of the quiz/ assessment, where most of the students needed more support or practice to master it. It was more about geometrical terms and how we represent them in diagrams or provide definitions. Then I assess them differently this time. The students worked in small groups to create posters with specific requirements showing their understanding of angles and properties.
The feedback that I used to give is either questions to let the students think more profoundly about the concept, connect the question to their previous knowledge, answer a student question/ wondering, or even comment about a missing part. And these are couple of my feedback about an exit ticket: