I’ve come across various feedback policies during my time as a teacher and teacher educator. I’ve noticed there were a variety of important features of these policies, but one thing that was often missing was an answer to the questions of, “what does ‘good’ feedback look like? How do I come up with it?” And I think the answer lies in understanding the origins of the term. The term ‘feedback’ appears to have its origins in engineering. A critical idea here though is that feedback was not particularly useful in and of itself, but it was a key component of a feedback loop.
“Feedback about the discrepancy between the current state and desired state is useless unless there is also a mechanism within the feedback loop to bring the current state closer to the desired state.” [1]
A classic example is that of a thermostat. A thermostat (crudely) works like this:
Set required temperature (desired state)
Measure current temperature (current state)
Compare current temperature with the required temperature (identify gap between current state and desired state)
Engage system that will bring the current state in line with the desired state (close the gap)
All 4 of these stages are critical – if any of them are missing we’re likely to roast or freeze pretty quickly! So, in order to support our students with effective feedback, just as with the thermostat, we also need to have a clearly defined desired state of what effective feedback looks like and an awareness of common pitfalls so that we can avoid them or pull ourselves out of them if need be. We’ll be exploring what effective feedback looks like in a later post, but for now we’re going to explore common practices that, whilst well intended, may not have the intended impact on our students.
Common Pitfalls
I want to preface this section by saying that, whilst all the examples I discuss below are things that I’ve experienced or seen in schools, they have always been done with the best of intentions. We all want to the best for our students and it’s absurd to suggest otherwise. Part of wanting the best means ruthlessly reflecting on each and every aspect of our practice – not because we need to change “bad” practices, but because wanting the best for our students means we owe it to them to ask, “is there something better? Is this the best possible thing?”
The feedback policies I mentioned earlier often fell foul of some common pitfalls. With the previous paragraph in mind, let’s explore some of them.
A conflation between marking & feedback
“Marking should serve a single purpose – to advance pupil progress and outcomes.” [2]
The EEF guidance report on feedback found that marking was often conflated or used in priority over more helpful forms of feedback. A crucial mistake to make here is that it is not the marking that is in and of itself “bad”. Instead, we should ask two questions:
Does the marking enable students to improve their learning?
In the time that was spent marking, was there an activity that teachers could’ve engaged in that would have been of more benefit for pupil learning?
This second one is particularly important. Marking is not done in isolation, it is often the end of a process which will involve extensive planning, teaching, assessing, and adapting. So, the question is, if teachers have a given amount of time to do their work, would students benefit more from their teacher spending that time marking, or something else (e.g. lesson planning, engaging in PD etc.)? If we’re engaging in these activities because we want the best for our students, then it’s imperative we prioritise whatever activity will most benefit students.
Focusing on the form/method of feedback
“Focus on what really matters: the principles of good feedback rather than the written or verbal methods of feedback delivery” [3]
The perennial debate over whether spoken or written feedback is something that we’re not going to settle here, with the main reason being that any answer is unlikely to get us closer to what effective feedback looks like. If my spoken feedback is unclear and goes off on a tangent it’s unlikely to be of more benefit than clear, concise written feedback. Conversely if my written feedback focuses on too many topics it probably would’ve been more effective to give students short bits of spoken feedback on fewer things at a time.
This leads to another common pitfall…
Not designing tasks with feedback in mind
“If a teacher cannot think of what to say to a student—having seen the student’s work—then the fault is most likely that the…activities that were assigned were not designed with a view to giving feedback in the first place.” [4]
Feedback (particularly written) is often given on relatively lengthy pieces of work (end of unit tests, mock exams, extended pieces of work etc.). These pieces of work require a fair amount of knowledge from different areas, be that different topics or sub-topics in a test or exam, or knowledge about what to write as well as how to write. In these situations, feedback often ends up having too many priorities and focuses on a lot of areas. Given what we know about working memory, namely that it is incredibly limited, feedback that focuses on too many things is unlikely to have the desired impact as it’s simply going to overwhelm students’ working memory. So, we need to make sure that the activities we’ve given students facilitate the delivery and use of feedback.
Focusing on the frequency of feedback
“Given the ambiguity in the evidence, the timing of feedback should be left to the careful judgement of the classroom teacher.” [5]
What is hopefully becoming clear at this point is that there is significant crossover between these pitfalls. The task design is likely to have an impact on how we deliver feedback, whether we conflate marking with feedback, and finally on how often we provide it. If tasks are large, the feedback will take time to prepare and deliver and so it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to deliver it frequently. Instead, frequency should be trusted to teachers’ professional judgement which can account for task design and method of delivery.
Principles over methods
So, what should we focus on instead? The principles of effective feedback:
Laying the foundations for effective feedback
Delivering feedback that focuses on moving learning forward
Planning for what pupils will do with the feedback
We’ll explore these in more detail in a future post
This post was written as part of my work with the EEF's Greenshaw Research School. You can find out more about them here.
[1] Wiliam, D. (2011). Embedded formative assessment. Solution tree press. [2] Eliminating unnecessary workload around marking, the Report of the Independent Teacher Workload Review Group (2016), chaired by Dawn Copping [3] EEF (2021). Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning, Guidance Report [4] Wiliam, D. In EEF (2021). Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning, Guidance Report [5] EEF (2021). Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning, Guidance Report
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