Practical things to try

It’s easy for us to stick with a feedback method we’re very familiar with and not try something new, but I strongly encourage you to try screencast video feedback. Just like written feedback, it can be used with students in different ways. For example, individual screencast feedback is an excellent supplement to written comments, and is a great way to establish teaching presence, convey your interest and care about the student’s learning, and provide clearer, richer feedback. When you’re preparing to record, think carefully about what you intend to cover in the video. Screen capture video feedback is ideal for when you want to give a verbal explanation, show a visual demonstration, or discuss an issue that spans across the text. Screen capture video feedback can also be used for group feedback.

For example, if you are grading assessments and you find there are common patterns or themes of feedback, for efficiency, you could create a video for the whole class addressing these common themes. One way to do this could be to create a short video or a set of videos annotating and commenting on models of excellent student work. You may also like to develop and implement a peer video feedback activity with your students to create engagement among students within the class. Like any peer feedback activity, it’s important to provide training and guidance, so that students can provide good quality feedback, but it’s well worth the time invested to do that.

Hi Kyle. You’ve done a great job with your essay and discussion of the recovery oriented approach. So well done. I can see you’ve put a lot of hard work into this paper. I’ve popped a few written comments down the side which you’ll see when you open the document, so I’ll leave those for you to read yourself but I’ll take the time now to explain a few of the comments in a little bit more detail.

First of all, your essay was a pleasure to read. It just flowed really well. It had accurate referencing. So it was really very easy to read. So well done with that. One thing I did notice though, was that the introduction is perhaps a little bit long. So when I highlight it like this and move down to the word count at the bottom of the screen here, you can see it’s at 296 words, which is a little bit long for a 1500 word essay, and makes up quite a big percentage of the total word count. Ideally, as a rule of thumb, you probably wanna stick to around 10%, so closer to around 150 words in this case, if it was up to say 200, that’s okay, but 296 is at the really high end and a bit disproportionate. As we’ve discussed, introductions should always give an outline of what’s to come, which is what you’ve got here, and it should have a thesis statement, which is what you’ve got here. So you’d wanna keep those parts, but some of the detail and background at the start of the introduction here could perhaps be condensed or some of the info could be moved to the body. So you might wanna reflect on that and definitely keep in mind those proportions when you are preparing your future essays.

One other thing I noticed in the introduction is this here. This is actually all one sentence, and obviously it’s really long. You’ve got some punctuation, so you’ve got a semicolon here and a colon there, but that doesn’t fully chop the sentence up. And as a reader, I’d sort of lost my train of thought by the end. So always keep a lookout for very long sentences and in this case, swapping the semicolon or the colon to a full stop would help with readability and ensure that that good information is fully digested by the reader.

Moving down to the body. You’ve given a good brief overview of the origin of the recovery model and a clear definition and explanation of the principles that underpin the approach which is great. One thing I noticed though, is that you have relied quite heavily on the book by Hungerford and colleagues at times, and I’ve highlighted the instances on this page to illustrate what I mean. It’s a great text and it’s very relevant, but it’s important that we always look at a variety of sources and synthesize that information so that we are understanding and capturing those different perspectives. There’s actually a fair bit of Australian research on this topic that you might want to look into, and I can certainly help point you in the right direction if need be. So just let me know. You’ve then introduced the six principles, which is great and then you’ve done an excellent job discussing them each of them in turn in the subsequent paragraph. So well done. However, I do think that there’s room for a more critical evaluation of the principles, and on the next page here, I’ve put a comment here as an example of what I mean.

So this is the paragraph where you discuss the principle of real choices and a way you could enhance your discussion of the principles, including this one, is to think about contexts or situations where it might be challenging to do this. So for example, in this case, the reality of living in rural and remote areas is that service delivery is challenged by issues related to distance, and isolation, and fewer formal services. So do people there actually have the opportunity to choose which service provider or counselor they see? Perhaps not. So some critical analysis of those kind of issues would really help elevate this paper. It could be incorporated within each paragraph where you discuss each principle, so you could add a sentence or two to this paragraph, or it could be a paragraph or two on its own. So after you explain each principle, you may have a paragraph or two with that more critical analysis where you put it all together and have that before your conclusion.

The final thing I wanted to mention was something to do with your reference list. So I’ll just go there now. You have some great references in your reference list but just in terms of formatting according to APA style, you actually need to have a hanging indent, which means that the second and subsequent lines of each reference needs to be indented. And the easiest way to do this is to highlight your whole reference list. I’ll just highlight this section here as an example. But you can highlight your list, and then move up to the ruler here. And you wanna grab that bottom triangle, hanging indent, and move it across. And you can see there that actually moves the second, the subsequent lines of each reference into that hanging indent. So that’s a little tip for you in case you didn’t know that. But as I said, you’ve done a good job with this essay and please feel free to reach out if you’d like to talk more about it. You can call, or email, or we can have a chat when we next meet, but well done.