Feedback and Teaching

We learn from feedback.

In fact, it's the primary way we learn.

Usually this comes from making mistakes and errors, seeing how our efforts have fallen short, or are misconstrued, then revising and trying again.

But learning from feedback is not always easy.

Especially in schools.

Students need to receive feedback first, then interpret and reflect on what it means and most importantly, figure out what to do with it.

This is complicated by the fact that every morning we greet a wonderfully diverse array of learners who often view the same feedback in surprisingly different ways.

It's a given that our students don't learn everything we teach them.

This is why feedback provided through assessments is one of the most important elements of effective teaching.

However, in the world of education, probably nothing is more fraught with anxiety than assessment.

From the Common Core to the APs, we worry about how high stakes testing affects our students.

Fortunately, this is not the sort of assessment we'll be talking about here.

Instead, we will be talking about formative assessment and what that means for student learning.

By formative assessment we mean gathering information about student performance that we use to move their learning forward and improve our teaching.

The evidence supporting classroom formative assessment as one of the most powerful enhancers of student learning is some of the strongest in educational research.

It works and it's very powerful.

That said, it's not always easy to practice.

So let's go over the central principles of effective formative assessment.

We can't do complete justice here to this complex and challenging aspect of effective teaching.

For those interested in both the theory and practical implications of formative assessment, we encourage you to become familiar with the work of Dylan William and Jan Chappuis and others.

Effective formative assessment revolves around three basic questions.

What is it you want your students to learn? Where are they now? How do you move their learning forward? In other words, how do we close the gap between desired learning goals and students' current understanding? In practice, it's much more complicated to answer these questions for our students.

The first move is to be clear about what it is we want students to know and be able to do with what they know.

In addition, it's important to consider within our array of intended learning goals, the following question.

What do we prioritize as the most important learning outcomes we want our students to possess enduringly? In other words, what skills and knowledge do we want to transfer beyond the short term? What do we want our students to walk across the stage possessing? As we've emphasized in this course, creating durable and lasting memories requires special learning and teaching conditions.

It's important that as our priority learning goals are determined, they're shared with students along with the criteria for exemplary work and how we will know when they've been met.

We need to involve students in understanding where we're heading in a learning way.

A clear destination with purpose can be a compelling motivator.

Providing examples and models of weak and strong work can be helpful in conveying to students clear and understandable learning goals.

This is important because students need to begin to develop an understanding of what quality work looks like so they can internalize standards for good work.

For teachers, being clear about priority learning outcomes provides us with the evidence we need to collect for our next step.

Where are my students now? There are a myriad ways to figure out what students currently know and can do.

That doesn't mean it's easy.

It would be nice if we could pry open our students' heads and look inside.

Since we can't do that, you'll need to figure out in ways that make sense for your students and school situation.

This will always be a challenge since truly figuring out what our students know is a virtually impossible task.

That said, we'll offer a few suggestions.

First, provide descriptive feedback to students that helps them answer questions like what are my strengths and what am I doing well? How does my work compare to our success criteria? What am I doing not so well and why? What are the most important things I need to work on? Comments need to be clear, tangible, and user friendly in terms of language that the students can readily understand.

Students need to clearly see the gap between where they are and where they need to be.

Refer them to the criteria or verbix you have developed.

Best when done with them so that your comments are goal referenced.

It's also important for them to be able to prioritize.

We often provide students with too much feedback and they don't always know where to focus.

Second, as Dylan Williams suggests, the best way to figure out what students know is by talking to them and engaging them in dialogue.

He and others provide a number of practical techniques for collecting evidence about what your students are able to do.

Third, teach students to self and peer-assess.

We want our students to eventually be weaned from us in determining the quality of their work.

Over time, they should be able to ask and answer questions like those posed earlier about their strengths and weaknesses as well as what to work on next.

A good way for them to learn how to do this is to work with peers, providing each other feedback.

But be aware, kids need to be trained on how to do this well.

Finally, and this is important, decouple grades or evaluative feedback from your descriptive feedback.

Research shows, and your own teaching experience probably affirms, that as soon as we put a grade along with our comments, a large number of students will ignore our feedback as they react to the grade, good or bad.

This doesn't mean we don't provide feedback that lets them know the quality of their work.

We can still convey that in our narrative comments as we help them see their strengths and weaknesses as it relates to our success criteria.

Nor does it mean they never get grades as a part of their feedback.

This can be accomplished in a number of ways in conjunction with them or not.

But our strong encouragement is to not provide feedback in the form of descriptive comments and grades at the same time.

Hopefully, when feedback is effective, our students can see the gap between where we would like them to be and where they currently are.

The next move is to help them close the performance gap in a way that improves the quality of their work.

We don't have the time here to go through a thorough discussion of all the ways to give students effective feedback, but we'll say a few key things.

As we've discussed elsewhere, developing in students a growth mindset is important.

If they believe that their effective effort will be the most important factor in their enhanced achievement, then they'll be much more likely to pay attention to our feedback.

It's crucial, therefore, that we help them become more effective in their effort and hard work.

We mentioned earlier it's common to provide too much feedback to our students, which is a problem for two reasons.

First, it can be overwhelming, especially for struggling students.

Second, voluminous comments can take a lot of teacher time, which is unfortunate if the feedback ends up not being very effective.

Instead, have students focus on their most important areas in need of revision and improvement.

Both to hopefully give them a sense of accomplishment but also to help them discern priorities.

In addition, over time, try and create a classroom culture where peer and self-assessment become an integral part of the way students receive feedback.

Our third suggestion is probably the most important one.

Unless students do something with the feedback they receive, and actually act upon it in some way to improve their learning, it is probably a waste of time.

Dylan William goes so far as to say the only thing that matters about feedback is what the students do with it.

This leads to our final point which makes the last point possible.

We need to allocate class and homework time for students to respond in some way to our feedback.

This means we need to make some hard choices and carve out time for our students to meaningfully apply the most important feedback they get in order to improve their learning.

And we need to hold them accountable for doing something with our feedback.

We can't just carve the time.

Research shows, and our own teaching practices affirm, that the more our students receive ongoing feedback to improve their learning, the better their performance will be.

This will almost assuredly reinforce their growth mindset and increase their sense of self-efficacy.

If we do this in a way that's transparent and involves them in the self-assessment and self-adjustment of their work, their sense of competency and autonomy will also increase and likely increase their motivation for moving forward with their learning.

An added bonus is that formative assessment done well also provides real time information about the impact of our teaching.

It becomes a vital and informative link between our teaching and our students' learning.

If you asked me, something all teachers should become really good at, I'd probably say it would be making the practice of formative assessment an integral part of day to day classroom culture.

It's that important.