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Stith Synchronous Critique
Stith Synchronous Critique
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.
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
Objectives
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
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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
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
There was no participant sharing of best practices or strategies that I could see
Communication
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
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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
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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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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