Feedback

You know the learning goals and success criteria of a lesson. You also know how to act and present in a formative way during the lesson, by using formative teaching methods. These help students to achieve their learning goals, as well as to find out what they have already achieved and what they have not yet achieved. What you do next is to provide feedback.

With feedback you show where the student is, in relation to the intended learning goal. You do this by asking questions. You can take a test and ask questions at different cognitive levels, but you can also do that in class. Here are five tips on giving good feedback.

Tip 1: Give feedback on the task or process

“You are lazy” is an example of feedback about the person. However, good feedback is about the task, the process and approach of the student. Feedback on the person promotes a fixed mindset (I don’t really have to do anything, because I’m lazy anyway), while feedback on the task or process promotes a growth mindset (if I change my approach, my results will improve).

Tip 2: Provide feedback that is linked to the learning objectives and success criteria for each of the cognitive categories

Through the feed-up that you provided in the first stage of the formative learning process, students know exactly what they are working towards (the learning objectives) and what good work looks like (the success criteria). Feedback that is directly linked to this will make it easier for students to understand. Clear learning goals and success criteria also help students to assess at their own work or when giving feedback to a classmate.

Tip 3: You give good feedback in a conversation

Perhaps you tend to make feedback a “one-way street”. But feedback is best received in conversation. Ask your student questions, such as “Tell me, how did you handle this?”, or “It’s great that you tried this, but what do you think would help you do even better on the next assignment?” Feedback resulting from a conversation motivates and supports a student to achieve their goal and leads to better learning performance. In conversations, don’t forget to (first) look at what is going well! If you first look at what is going well with a student, you create fertile soil for feed forward.

Tip 4: Feed forward is intertwined in feedback

Feedback refers back to the work done and feed forward refers to next steps that help get closer to the goal. As a result, feedback will have to become concrete so that students will do something with it. “I can see that you are having a hard time doing these multiplication problems. Try the following problems with this step-by-step plan. Let me know if you’re having trouble with a particular step. Otherwise, we will look at it together when you are ready.”

Tip 5: Feedback must be useful for a new task too

When giving feedback on the process of how the student did, it becomes feed forward for the new task ahead. For example: ”You are often so enthusiastic about an assignment and so eager to start, that you sometimes forget what exactly is being asked of you and only find out when you’re all done. Next time, read carefully what the assignment is and underline the key words of the assignment. Then come and explain the assignment to me, so that I can hear whether you have understood the assignment correctly.”

Feedback to a group and to individual students

Giving everyone individual feedback would seem to take a lot of time, but if you do it in a smart way, it does not have to. Your feedback does not have to be on how every single student is doing in relation to the learning goals for the subject matter, but can instead be on how they are doing in relation to the cognitive categories Reproduction, Training, Transfer and Insight.
You will quickly see and know through experience what your students encounter, and can provide feedback to the entire class first. Next, you can get those students together that struggle with a specific category and give them feedback as a group. Finally you can help those students that have a unique cognitive and/or behaviour pattern.

Ownership and self-regulation

What will save you a lot of time along the way is working on self-regulation. Students who feel ownership of their learning process will be more motivated to look at their development. It doesn’t have to be complicated at all and you can start small. For example, have students colour in the box of a learning goal that they have achieved on an RTTI Rubric. Or by letting students think for themselves about what to do next. You can also teach them how they can ask for help effectively. You can hand out a reflection form after a completed assignment and of course can discuss all this in class or in groups.