Right from the start, ClassDojo has been built on feedback from teachers, parents, and students; your thoughtful ideas and suggestions have helped improve ClassDojo time and time again. Thanks to you, over 45 million students are now learning the character strengths and behaviors they need to be successful in life: things like persistence, curiosity, creativity and leadership. We believe that connecting teachers, parents, and students to improve understanding of how students are developing is a wonderful thing – and we’re excited to be able to help!

Similarly, we believe that improving understanding between you — the teachers and parents we work with every day — and us, the ClassDojo team, is just as important.

We’re delighted to share a new, free iOS and Android app that is the easiest way to instant message with parents: ClassDojo Messenger.

With the new ClassDojo Messenger app, you can:

• Easily engage parents by instantly sending updates home Privately message 1-on-1 with a parent, or Broadcast to an entire class of parents at once!

• Share photos of wonderful moments from the classroom 🙂

• Know who’s read your messages with ‘Read receipts’

• What’s more, it’s private for everyone: you never share personal contact details.

Learn more about this great app and get it today for the new school year!

We hope you love ClassDojo Messenger 🙂

Teachers play a powerful role in a child’s life. Besides parents, teachers have the grand responsibility of inspiring, motivating, teaching, and sharing valuable lessons and knowledge with young learners.

In the classroom setting, teachers set the tone for learning by creating a warm and inviting environment, where they can mentor, nurture, and take account of the needs and well-being of their students.

Come to think about it, teachers have an extremely challenging job. From grading papers to striving to meet the vast criteria of a “written in stone” curriculum, teachers wear several hats. Aside from those demands, educators bear the weight of being responsible for the overall academic achievement of students. With that comes the task of feedback.

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What does feedback do, you may ask. Student feedback is one of the most vital aspects of a student’s academic career, as it ensures they’re on the right trajectory to succeed. It’s a gauge which paints a picture for students, offering insight about their student work portfolio, and where they are, and where they could be. Teacher student feedback, as powerful as it is, can influence students’ overall performance, self-perception, motivation to learn, and academic engagement.

Constructive feedback in education is nothing short of essential to the learning experience, as well as the teacher-student and teacher-parent relationship. It’s not only indicative of how much the educator cares about the learning taking place, it also shows they have a stake in their students’ outcome. Furthermore, constructive feedback gives parents a clear understanding of the educator’s overall goals for a particular subject or unit, and the goals set for their individual child. Parents can then target their attention where necessary and help their child leverage the feedback for success.

While student feedback is meant to be a good thing – a crucial component of helping students improve current skills, develop new ones, and acknowledge progress, it can oftentimes be viewed as judgement or criticism. Moreover, feedback is sometimes offered in a soley negative and corrective way, which can easily convey the wrong message, making it counterproductive and detrimental to learning. If not delivered correctly, feedback can leave students feeling uninspired, angry, and worthless, along with experiencing a slump in classroom performance.

That said, constructive feedback to students must be purposeful to the individual student’s needs and learning journey. It must be clear and direct, as well as encouraging and productive.

There are two main forms of feedback to students, summative and formative. Summative feedback focuses on learning after the fact. It’s an evaluation of learning at the end of a learning cycle. For instance, summative feedback examples for students would include grades at the end of a semester, a unit, or a school year.

On the other hand, formative feedback is designed to guide the learning process. The benefit of this type of feedback is the attention paid to areas of weakness (and strengths), and the encouragement for future improvement. In essence, the feedback is a tool to be used on the student’s next learning opportunity.

For the purpose of this article, we’ll look at formative student feedback. Dealing with multiple students on a daily basis, educators have to be consistent and deliberate in their feedback, as it’s easy to say “good work” and move on to the next student. To avoid such lax feedback let’s examine some techniques regarding how to give constructive feedback to learners.

Be positive. Before offering feedback, find something to praise. Build the student’s confidence as a learner by complimenting them on what they are doing well, then focus on improvement areas. Be specific. Avoid phrases like “Not quite there yet” and “You’re doing great” – neither communicates what needs to be improved. Instead, discuss the exact weakness and tactics to change the outcome.

Be immediate. This is one of the most critical examples of student feedback for teachers. The ideal time to provide feedback is during the learning process, which can deepen a student’s understanding, while prohibiting the reinforcement of incorrect ideas.

Now for a few student feedback strategies.

Use technology. ClassDojo is a unique app that’s perfect for communicating with students (and parents), especially when offering feedback. ClassDojo allows educators the ability to do a variety of things on one platform like tracking student progress, sharing feedback, assigning writing prompts, and creating a dialogue between students and parents.

Schedule 1-on-1 conferences. Conferences are an effective way to personalize feedback, instead of relying on written comments.

Demonstrate. Along with giving verbal feedback, modeling or showing examples of what you’re looking for has proven to be a helpful tactic.

We’ve only touched on a few examples of student feedback, but the main takeaway is to remember that feedback must be useful, positive, and suited to the individual student’s learning journey.

What other positive feedback examples for students would you add? What has worked for your students?

Hello, folks 🙂

Since ClassDojo’s beginnings, millions of teachers have signed up to use ClassDojo in their classrooms. Over time, we’ve been excited to hear those teachers spread it to other teachers in their schools and grade-levels – creating entire ‘ClassDojo schools’ where every teacher uses ClassDojo, or whole grade-level teams using ClassDojo to help students develop the behaviors and skills they need for success.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce two features that make using ClassDojo across an entire grade-level or school – or even with just a few other teachers – a lot easier! Now, for the first time, you’ll be able to connect with other teachers in your school to teach classes together, share student rosters, and track your students’ progress across all their different classes. These features have been the most popular requests from teachers everywhere over the last few years – we hope you like them 🙂

There are two ways to work together with other ClassDojo teachers, Shared Students and Shared Classes:

• With Shared Students, teachers can connect with each other and share individual students to fill each other’s classes. Setting up your classes will be faster by pulling from the school roster, and you can also view students’ reports from their other teachers’ classes.

• With Shared Classes, you and your colleagues can teach the same class, awarding feedback points in each others’ classes, and instantly messaging parents! This feature is great for teaching assistants and also classes that move together during the school day.

Read more details on the ClassDojo Community Forum!

We’ve been hard at work building these features to help you use ClassDojo across your whole school or grade level – and this is just the first step! We hope you love what we’re launching today, and we’d love your feedback – let us know what you think in the comments below, or by emailing us at hello@classdojo.com 🙂

Do you remember what it was like to be a “new” teacher? I do. I was lucky enough to have student taught for the campus I was hired on. The principal brought me my contract while I was in the cafeteria on lunch duty and I thought I was going to cry in front of all of those students — I was so excited!

Once I knew what subject I would be teaching, I started planning. I had to come up with every aspect and detail of my classroom. My classroom trajectory was a blank slate! How was I going to get kids to line up? Was I going to have classroom jobs? How would I hand out textbooks? Would I have a seating arrangement? I spent most of that summer thinking about my classroom — my home away from home. It was certainly an exciting two months. I had no experiences with uninvolved parents, so I designed elaborate newsletters that would share every detail of our classroom. From upcoming lesson plans to expectations at home, these newsletters were going to highlight the week’s happenings. There was even a section for a student-written piece each week.

I had no experience with unprepared students, so my plans were designed with the highest of expectations. Projects, collaboration, ideas galore…I had no concept of a district imposed testing schedule. Cross-curricular planning? You bet! We had science and math connections each week, with a student artifact as their summative assessment. My students were going to complete every assignment, on time, and perfectly… because I was going to teach content that thoroughly!

The novelty of being a “new” teacher is the absence of being jaded. You arrive with the best intentions and pie in the sky ideas since you have few past experiences to constrain or even ruin your ideas. You’re excited to have this job. You know and believe you will change lives.

I challenge you to start this new school year with that same mindset — the one that some may call naive. If you’re a veteran teacher, let go of the past. After all, every classroom is unique. Find that blank slate again, and be ready to change lives and conquer the world! How can you do that? Try to start with these classroom “refreshers”:

• Change the layout of your classroom. Do something totally different with your seating arrangement. Dump your teacher’s desk. Change your “power zone” of teaching.

• Start on a different foot. That first week folder? With those same “get to know you” activities you’ve been doing every year? Trash it! Do something new this year!

• Block it all out. This year, don’t listen to anyone’s opinions about your upcoming class. Every year is a brand new beginning for every student and every teacher. Start with the highest of expectations for each child. You are the defining factor in how your students behave in your classroom, and you have the opportunity to set the tone for the year — make it a positive one! Let your classroom be full of good choices, mistakes, do overs, and grace.

The reality of my first year, obviously, didn’t pan out quite the way I was thinking it would. But, I came back the second year, just as excited, and full of even more plans and ideals. No matter how veteran you are, I hope that you can become a brand new teacher again this year!

We’re really proud that ClassDojo will work in any classroom environment and on any device. Android is certainly one platform that is always top of mind as we create new features and launch new apps!

We recently sat down with our friends at Google for Education to share our Developer story. Take a quick watch to hear from Sam, Liam, and Kalen 🙂

Our teacher community continues to highlight many new potential features that can improve classrooms everywhere. We just launched one of those recently! With ’Shared Classes,’ teachers can connect other teachers in their school to their ClassDojo classes. This means that multiple teachers can give feedback points to the same class and send messages to the same parents with their own logins. Teachers can now easily partner with their grade-level team, specialist teachers, TAs, and substitute teachers WITHOUT sharing a log in 🙂

Visit ClassDojo.com to try Shared Classes out today!

At Sacred Heart School in Atherton, the “Code of the Heart” is a set of soft skills that all grades are expected to internalize and incorporate with academic skills. Characteristics of readiness, responsibility, respect and caring share equal emphasis on importance as academic performance. To this end, Mayrin Bunyagidj, a Sacred Heart first grade teacher uses ClassDojo to encourage her students for demonstrating the Code of the Heart aspects of character development. “Seeing and hearing specific comments about their character help my students to become more empathetic with their peers,” says Bunyagidj.

Watch more “Ideas for the Classroom“ to uncover other great ways teachers incorporate ClassDojo into their workflow.

Sonya Castillo is a bilingual 5th grade teacher teacher at Jefferson Elementary in San Leandro. Castillo tracks in-class participation with the ultimate goal of helping students understand how their goals are self-driven and self-motivated. Using ClassDojo, Sonya can customize feedback to be highly relevant to her classroom needs. She selects behaviors that help her students become more self-reflective. Also, she writes the behaviors in Spanish, enabling Castillo’s native-speaking families to check-in from a device or a home computer to see how their students are improving and participating. The specificity of her feedback also makes parent/ teacher conferences substantially more informative.

Watch more “Ideas for the Classroom“ to uncover other great ways teachers incorporate ClassDojo into their workflow.

Positive Behavior Intervention and Support specialist Paul Callis uses ClassDojo to help special education students build their confidence as learners. Callis, who supports students between 6th and 12th grade at the Coliseum College Prep Academy in Oakland, says his students usually need to work to build back some lost self-esteem before they can tackle more rigorous academic matters. Once the students feel valued and successful, Callis can begin to get through to their potential. “That’s when the work comes in. First, to get them onto grade level, they need to be in a positive place,” he adds. Using ClassDojo, Callis looks for ways to reinforce the positive trajectory he and his students are building. This reinforcement creates a virtuous circle of self confident students who help one another, are punctual and prepared.

Watch more “Ideas for the Classroom“ to uncover other great ways teachers incorporate ClassDojo into their workflow.