Approaches to feedback, such as written marking or 'whole class feedback', are popular classroom strategies that are undertaken daily with students of all ages and stages. But do they truly land with students in the ways we intend? Or is it like a message in a bottle, cast out with no certainty of where, or even if, it will be received?
Feedback is a tricky business. It can be time-consuming, essential to learning, but also unpredictable. Harnessed effectively, it appears to have a big positive impact on learning. But doing it well is hard work and teachers most often don't know if their message has actually landed.
Over the past few years, debates have raged about the relative effectiveness of written feedback versus oral feedback. Given the effort and time-consuming nature of written feedback in particular, teachers have been keen to prioritise oral feedback.
The evidence is rather equivocal, but oral feedback has become increasingly popular as the go-to mode of feedback for time-pressed teachers. Whatever the mode of feedback selected, challenges abound to make it land effectively and prove worthy of teachers, and students', time.
What may be the problem with 'whole class verbal feedback'?
A common method for verbal feedback is 'whole class feedback'. Most typically this includes: reading students' work, making notes - such as on strengths, weaknesses and misconceptions - then delivering the feedback verbally to all students at once.
This can save time writing individual comments in books, or convening 1-to-1 feedback (effort and teacher, and teaching, time matter when it comes to selecting feedback strategies).
A key problem is that the students who are most likely to need targeted feedback on their learning do not interpret whole class feedback as relating to them.
Students can suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect, where they think they are above average and better than they actually are. This overconfidence is toxic for effective responses to teacher feedback. The general nature of 'whole class feedback' can make it particularly prone to this flaw in students' learning.
A bitter truth for teachers is that poor performers lack the self-awareness (metacognition) to judge their own performance accurately. As the saying goes, 'they don't know what they don't know'. Individual students can struggle to identify what whole class feedback applies to them and what doesn't.
What may be the problem with written feedback?
Written feedback has its own issues that make it hard to make work for every student.
First, written feedback can be laborious and by the time the message reaches students, it could be day (even weeks) after the task itself. It is hard even for high prior attaining students to respond to, and integrate, written feedback so that it improves their future work.
Students may not understand the teachers' language, or have time and the independence to apply it to improve their work. International research has shown that too few students improve their writing despite being given feedback on revisions.
Popular approaches such as 'live marking' can model feedback in the moment - so students don't have to wait for days. And yet, the message we want to communicate during live marking' feedback may not hit home because students are already overloaded and their working memory cannot follow the example, understand the teacher feedback, and then apply it to their own work.
Whether it is verbal or written, weaker students are prone to seeing feedback as criticism, whereas stronger students are more likely to be proactive and help it drive their improvement. Weaker students can misjudge the fact they tried hard with the quality of what they have produced.
Should we not bother with feedback? But we should consider how the mitigate the possible issues that might arise if we don't support and target feedback to individuals.
How can feedback be improved?
Feedback is not a clear, simple exchange. It is a difficult, contingent, emotional, belief-laden effort. Teachers pose messages that can be easily lost, or can hit home very directly.
What can teachers do to enhance the likelihood that the message we want to convey with feedback hits home? Here are some evidence-informed strategies:
- Integrate peer feedback. When students provide comments to their peers, it can be more beneficial than receiving the message directly, as it is more cognitive engaging, where students need to grapple with the criteria and compose the message. In short, it forces active hard thinking and learning. It needs training and support to be impactful, but peer feedback added to the teacher feedback loop is likely to add a layer of valuable learning.
- Analysing multiple exemplars. Students can involve their egos too much when reflecting on their own work. Better than to create some distance and to get students think harder about their own learning by way of concrete examples and distinguishing examples to compare with. Instead of generic whole class verbal feedback, pick three anonymous examples and compare them. Attribute 'gold/silver/bronze', or 'improving/better/best' to distinguish the successful features. More comparisons, more precision, more active thinking and learning.
- Focus on next-step checks. Dylan Wiliam states that feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor. In short, the teacher needs to ensure the student is thinking hard about their feedback and acting up it. If students are reading written feedback, or listening to whole class verbal feedback, they need to create a checklist of individual actions they will undertake as a result e.g. in history, feedback on class essays on the Normans may elicit a checklist of three or four next steps for improvement. If students share and explain their next-steps, then they are more actively processing the feedback.
Feedback is too often just hard work for students no matter their starting points. But for those students who struggle, and have low self-confidence, it is particularly fraught.
We should consider whether our strategies and feedback habits are getting the message through. Are teacher efforts leading to hard thinking and reflection, improving students' judgements, and leading to concrete actions that improve their learning.
If teachers are pouring hours into writing feedback, they need to know it won’t drift aimlessly like a message in a bottle, but land exactly where and how they intend.
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