While much of the team here have been cutting labels and fulfilling your orders. I have been fumbling around trying to find my creative cap. The reason? To come up with and create some label templates that teachers can use for feedback.
If you’re a teacher or work at a school you’ll know how important feedback and marking is to give feedback to pupils in a way that is engaging and useful. And so there are a lot of different ways this can be done – plenaries, formative assessment, even peer and self-feedback. Here though, we’re specifically looking at how we can use sticky labels as a quick tool to give pupils an idea of where they are.
That’s why I created a set of pre-designed label templates that focus on learning objectives. The feedback options are ‘Objective Met’, ‘Progress Towards Objective’ or ‘Objective not met’.
I set about coming up with ideas for different concepts that could be applied to those three marking choices. I wanted each set of stickers to have a theme that would carry through from Objective Met to Objective Not Met so that there was a visual cue as well as a written one to show what level the pupil is at.
The most challenging part in designing these templates was coming up with an Objective Not Met that kept to each theme but wouldn’t cause upset or too much disappointment and yet still get across that a lot more work was needed to achieve a higher level. A lot of the initial ideas I had fell down on that part.
One idea I rejected was:
Objective Met = Smiley face in green
Progress Towards Objective = Straight face in yellow
Objective Not Met = Sad face in red
Here’s how it looked:
To me, the sad face was too depressing and because of the red, it looked angry and sad! What do you think? I could have changed the faces and colours so that it wouldn’t have this effect but it might have diluted the message. In any case, this concept is probably a bit over-used. So I needed to get back to the drawing board!
After quizzing a teacher about it, we came up with five concepts. Here’s a photo of my initial scribbles showing a very rough idea of four of the concepts:
Apart from showing you my inability to draw, you can probably see that they each clearly have a theme and will give pupils a visual cue of where they’re at without being too negative if the pupil hasn’t met their objective.
Here’s how they looked, once completed (these aren’t the template you need to print these designs, a link for that is below):
Click here to see and download the sticker templates
Hopefully, if you’re a teacher, these templates will be useful to you. They are free to download and use with your own sheets of blank sticky labels or you can buy them from us. Just click the link above to find out more.
Initial feedback has been great and reveals a favourite concept – the Apples design. That was a surprise to me. I thought any of the others would be more popular.
What do you think? In the comments below you can let me know if you thought I was right not to go with the smiley face concept and what you think of the final ideas. If you have an idea you can suggest it by clicking on the link above and submitting your idea on the form at the bottom of that page.
Not a teacher? Let me know if you would find a template like this useful.
