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Class Presentation/Professional Development Using Effective and Appropriate Feedback with your EL Students

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Class Presentation/Professional Development Using Effective and Appropriate Feedback with your EL Students

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Exploring Effective Feedback Techniques in the ESL Classroom

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Exploring Effective Feedback Techniques in the ESL Classroom

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Exploring Effective Feedback Techniques in the ESL Classroom

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Effective and Appropriate Feedback for English Learners

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Effective and Appropriate Feedback for English Learners

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What is feedback?

Feedback is information provided (by the teacher, a peer, a book or computer program or an experience) about aspects of a student's performance or the knowledge they have built up from a learning experience. Learners can use feedback to confirm, overwrite, fine tune or restructure existing knowledge, beliefs and strategies.

Why is feedback important?

Research suggests that appropriate, constructive and assessment-based feedback is one of the most critical features of effective teaching and learning. In a meta-analysis of over 800 studies, Hattie (2009) found feedback was the most important teacher practice in improving student learning. Feedback supports students to know where and how to improve, and it can support their motivation to invest effort in making improvements. It is an integral part of Assessment for Learning.

Well-timed feedback can support cognitive processes for better performance, including confirming or restructuring understanding, improving strategies, guiding students to more information, and suggesting directions and/or alternative strategies they could pursue in order to improve. Feedback can also engage students in metacognitive strategies such as goal setting, task planning, monitoring, and reflection, which are important skills for self-regulated learning. Feedback can influence students' affective processes, improving effort, motivation and engagement.

What kind of feedback do students need?

Feedback improves learning when it focuses on the particular qualities of the student's work, with specific guidance on what the student can do to improve.

Feedback should be user-friendly (specific and personalised), transparent, addressable, timely, ongoing, and content-rich. It also needs to be clear, purposeful, and compatible with students' existing knowledge, while providing little threat to self-esteem.

The best kinds of feedback:
* are goal-referenced: linked to, and assisting understanding of, the goals of learning
* are matched to the needs of the students, with the level of support they need
* are accurate and trustworthy (with teachers and students in agreement about what counts as success)
* are carefully timed: provided when students need it to improve learning (which might be during the learning activity, or before revising a piece of work)
* focus on strengths and weaknesses as well as revealing what students understand and misunderstand, and accompanied with strategies to help the student improve
* emphasise correct rather than incorrect responses
* focus on changes from previous work or understanding
* guide ongoing learning
* are directed towards enhanced self-efficacy and more effective self-regulation
* are two-way conversations (either written dialogue or oral) rather than one-way
* are used in conjunction with self and/or peer assessment
* do not threaten self-esteem
* are checked for clarity, adequacy and effectiveness with the student - "Does this feedback help?"
* are actionable - with the student given time to respond to and act on feedback.

Three stages to effective feedback

1. Feed-up: Before feedback can be given, students need to know the learning intention(s). Feed-up clarifies for the student Where am I going? What are the goals? This information sets the context for feedback.

2. Feedback: Feedback itself focuses on monitoring and assessing learning progression in relation to the learning intention or task. It is about How am I doing? What progress is being made towards the goals?

3. Feed-forward: This relates to the next steps required for improvement on a specific task or learning intention. It is about Where to next? What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress? Here the answer is likely to be directed to the refinement of goals, and seeking more challenging goals, because these are most likely to lead to greater achievement.

Effective feedback is when teachers and students address all three of these questions.

Three levels of feedback

Feedback operates on, or can be geared towards, three levels. These are:

1: Task-level (or product) feedback
Feedback aimed at the task or product describes students' performance and may offer students directions on how to acquire more, different or correct information.
Example: "That is correct. Could you include more information about the Treaty of Versailles?"
Immediate feedback is likely to be most effective for task-level feedback.
Task-level feedback is not the most powerful kind. This is because feedback at the task level is not usually generalisable to other tasks. However, this level of feedback can be effective when the information it provides about the task is later used for improving strategies or self-regulation. For example, task-level feedback might help students to reject incorrect interpretations and provide directions for better ways to process and understand the material.
Too much feedback at the task level focused on the accuracy of responses, and not on the processing required for these responses, can direct students' attention away from a higher-level understanding of their task performance, and focus them instead on a surface understanding of learning involving acquisition, storage and reproduction of knowledge.

2: Process-level feedback
Feedback aimed at the process of understanding focuses on how the student has completed a task or created a product.
Example: "You might find it easier to punctuate this page if you read it aloud with a peer."
Process-level feedback is particularly powerful for improving students' deep processing and mastery of tasks and directing students towards more effective task strategies. It provides a deeper understanding of learning, enabling students to appreciate relationships between strategies and performance, which helps them to transfer skills to more difficult or unfamiliar tasks.
Process-level feedback on metacognitive processes might focus on enhancing students' self-efficacy, self-regulatory skills or confidence to engage further on a task.
Example: "You already know the key features for introducing an argument, check to see that you have incorporated them into your first paragraph."
Feedback focused on cognitive or metacognitive processes is most effective when there is a delay between student performance and feedback, which enables better reflection.

3: Personal-level feedback
Feedback focused on the personal level is directed to the self and contains little task-related information.
Example: "That's an intelligent response, well done."
This is the least effective level of feedback as it rarely leads to more engagement, enhanced self-efficacy or better understanding of the task. In fact, praise often directs attention away from the task. When feedback draws attention to the self, students have a high fear of failure, and it becomes risky for students to tackle challenging tasks or to try hard. However, sometimes praise focused on the student's effort, self-regulation and engagement can assist in enhancing self-efficacy and increase student motivation.
Summary: Feedback that is designed to move students from the task to the underlying processes or understandings and then to self-regulation is most effective. For example, feedback based at task performance can build students' confidence and help them to feel more able to improve and experiment with strategy use. Then questioning and feedback can focus on learning strategies and metacognitive skills, which eventually help students to become self-regulating learners. These are the students that seek and give their own feedback!
How to improve feedback practices in your classroom

Ten ways to give better feedback

1. Give more quality feedback by reducing the number of pieces of work you assess. Spend more time on selected pieces of work to give thoughtful, constructive and appropriate feedback. To make time for this, teachers do not mark some pieces, or look at only a third of their students' books each week, or engage students in peer and self-assessment of some tasks.

2. Automate as many classroom processes as you can in order to devote more of your thinking to feedback. When teachers automate many other tasks in the classroom and enable students to take most of the responsibility for their learning and learning activity, they are able to devote more time and thought to giving sensitive, timely, content-rich feedback that is well-matched to the students' learning needs at that moment.

3. Be descriptive and refrain from evaluation or advice. Approach giving feedback by carefully observing and commenting on what has been observed, based on the learning intentions of the work or activity. For example, "The first few paragraphs kept my full attention, because the scene painted was vivid and interesting. But then the dialogue became hard to follow, and as a reader, I was confused about who was talking, so I became less engaged." Such feedback informs the student of their performance, without making value judgements, and offers direction for improvement, while leaving the responsibility to decide how to improve with the student.

4. Focus feedback on questions that challenge students. In topics where there are few right answers, try to use questions in your feedback that support students to tease out their assumptions or be critical about the quality of arguments.

5. Take into account students' affective beliefs. Students tend to interpret feedback according to their beliefs about their strengths and weaknesses which can sometimes distort the message the feedback was intended to convey. Students who have high levels of confidence in the accuracy of their response pay little attention to affirmative feedback (unless the response turns out to be incorrect, which focuses their attention on feedback). Similarly, students who expect their response to be wrong, and it turns out to be wrong, also largely ignore the accompanying feedback. Teachers need to plan their feedback to reinforce or challenge students' assumptions about themselves as learners. Teachers need to consider the ways and manner in which individuals interpret feedback so that feedback supports students in developing positive and valuable concepts of themselves and their learning.

6. Enhance the impact of feedback on student motivation. Students are more likely to increase effort when learning goals are clear, meaningful, and when their self-belief in their ability to succeed is high. Feedback that attributes success to effort rather than a student's ability to succeed tends to be more successful. This is because attributing success to one's ability suggests that effort is not required or is unlikely to alter students' ability to succeed.

7. Create an environment for learning which welcomes errors and corrective feedback. Feedback is most effective in learning environments where students are comfortable in making mistakes and where errors are seen as leading to future learning. If students perceive personal risk to responding in class and receiving negative feedback, they are less likely to engage in learning, and are more likely to reject or ignore feedback. Show students the benefits of (self-generated, peer-generated and teacher-generated) feedback to their learning. Teach error-detection strategies to students so that students can provide themselves with self-generated feedback.

8. Give students ownership of their own learning. When students have some autonomy and control, and feel accountable for their learning, they are often more receptive to seeking, accepting and using feedback information.

9. Consider cultural preferences. As well as individual preferences, students' preferences for the type and delivery of feedback may differ according to their culture. Students from individualist cultures (e.g. Europe, USA, Pākehā NZ) prefer direct feedback that is individually focused, and are more likely to seek feedback. Students from collectivist cultures (e.g. Confucian-based Asia, South Pacific nations) prefer indirect and implicit feedback, focused at the group rather than the individual level, with no feedback directed to at the personal level. However, bear in mind that when feedback is given at the group level, students may find it difficult to differentiate which feedback messages are relevant to them.

10. Involve everyone in the class (including visitors and parents) in giving and receiving feedback: Feedback does not always need to come from the teacher, or even from people! Widening the range of sources of feedback ensures students receive lots of timely feedback. However, the quality and accuracy of feedback is also important. Students can be taught the features of effective feedback, beyond immature criticisms and unhelpful praise, and simple proformas can be designed to elicit useful feedback from a range of peers and non-peers.

Ineffective feedback to avoid

Giving marks or grades
Students tend not to pay attention to feedback comments when they are given a mark or grade. Students who get low marks twice in a row come to expect to get low marks every time, with a negative impact on both motivation and achievement.

Comparisons with other students
Competitive environments also have a negative impact on motivation and achievement. Rather than comparing individuals against the performance of a class, a fairer comparison pits each student's current performance against their own previous performance. This comparison is seen as relevant and achievable, whereas trying to compete with peers is stressful for many students.

Extrinsic rewards
These undermine students taking responsibility for themselves, increase teacher control and surveillance, and generate competition amongst students.

Non-specific or general feedback
Telling students to work harder, or recalculate, does not help students know how or where to improve their work. Unclear evaluative feedback, which details students' successes and failures but does not specify reasons, is likely to have negative effects on self-efficacy, exacerbate poor performance and damage self-images.

Giving feedback unrelated to critical aspects of learning goals
Feedback should be clearly focused on the learning goals and agreed success criteria for meeting these goals. Students should not be given feedback on presentation, spelling and/or the quantity of writing when the learning goal is "creating mood in a story".

Overloading students with too much or too technical information
It is better to identify one important thing that you noticed, that, if changed, will likely yield immediate and noticeable improvement

Too much written feedback
Giving too much feedback in written form can be overwhelming for students and difficult to understand. Some students have difficulty understanding and processing written feedback. However, this can be mitigated by good communication between the teacher and student in which the student is invited to say if feedback is not useful or doesn't help them to make improvements.

Associating "what next?" with more
Often teachers suggest that students gather more information, or perform more tasks, so that students come to understand that the answer to "Where to next?" is "more". Instead, feedback can provide information on greater possibilities for learning, including enhanced challenges, more autonomy over the learning process, greater fluency, and diversifying strategies and processes for tasks.

Giving feedback when students lack knowledge or information
Feedback can only build on existing learning or understanding. Students with very little understanding of a content area are more likely to benefit from targeted instruction than from feedback on poorly constructed concepts. Feedback is better focused on faulty interpretations and fine-tuning performance.

Feedback checklist

How often does your feedback include the features in our Feedback checklist?

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How to integrate effective feedback into your classroom - THE EDUCATION HUB

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A detailed overview of effective feedback, and how to improve the nature of the feedback you give your students

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MAKING THE MOSTOF OUR WORDS Strategies for Providing EffectiveFeedback in Our Teaching

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MAKING THE MOSTOF OUR WORDS Strategies for Providing EffectiveFeedback in Our Teaching

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MAKING THE MOST OF OUR WORDS Strategies for Providing Effective Feedback in Our Teaching

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Less Work, More Learning: The Promise of Effective Feedback - ASCD

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A recent Twitter exchange between two teachers forced us to confront some common challenges with feedback. One educator asked, “Has there ever been anything more disproportionate than the amount of hours put into marking vs. the impact that marking has on individuals?” The second (tweeted by @Ms_KMP

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Google Classroom: Providing Effective Feedback

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Vol. 70

No. 1

Abstract

What Is Feedback, Anyway?

Feedback Essentials

Progress Toward a Goal

"But There's No Time!"

Advice, evaluation, grades-none of these provide the descriptive information that students need to reach their goals. What is true feedback-and how can it improve learning?

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Abstract

What Is Feedback, Anyway?

Feedback Essentials

Progress Toward a Goal

"But There's No Time!"

Who would dispute the idea that feedback is a good thing? Both common sense and research make it clear: Formative assessment, consisting of lots of feedback and opportunities to use that feedback, enhances performance and achievement.

Yet even John Hattie (2008), whose decades of research revealed that feedback was among the most powerful influences on achievement, acknowledges that he has "struggled to understand the concept" (p. 173). And many writings on the subject don't even attempt to define the term. To improve formative assessment practices among both teachers and assessment designers, we need to look more closely at just what feedback is-and isn't.

What Is Feedback, Anyway?

The term feedback is often used to describe all kinds of comments made after the fact, including advice, praise, and evaluation. But none of these are feedback, strictly speaking.

Basically, feedback is information about how we are doing in our efforts to reach a goal. I hit a tennis ball with the goal of keeping it in the court, and I see where it lands-in or out. I tell a joke with the goal of making people laugh, and I observe the audience's reaction-they laugh loudly or barely snicker. I teach a lesson with the goal of engaging students, and I see that some students have their eyes riveted on me while others are nodding off.

Here are some other examples of feedback:

A friend tells me, "You know, when you put it that way and speak in that softer tone of voice, it makes me feel better."

A reader comments on my short story, "The first few paragraphs kept my full attention. The scene painted was vivid and interesting. But then the dialogue became hard to follow; as a reader, I was confused about who was talking, and the sequence of actions was puzzling, so I became less engaged."

A baseball coach tells me, "Each time you swung and missed, you raised your head as you swung so you didn't really have your eye on the ball. On the one you hit hard, you kept your head down and saw the ball."

Note the difference between these three examples and the first three I cited-the tennis stroke, the joke, and the student responses to teaching. In the first group, I only had to take note of the tangible effect of my actions, keeping my goals in mind. No one volunteered feedback, but there was still plenty of feedback to get and use. The second group of examples all involved the deliberate, explicit giving of feedback by other people.

Whether the feedback was in the observable effects or from other people, in every case the information received was not advice, nor was the performance evaluated. No one told me as a performer what to do differently or how "good" or "bad" my results were. (You might think that the reader of my writing was judging my work, but look at the words used again: She simply played back the effect my writing had on her as a reader.) Nor did any of the three people tell me what to do (which is what many people erroneously think feedback is-advice). Guidance would be premature; I first need to receive feedback on what I did or didn't do that would warrant such advice.

In all six cases, information was conveyed about the effects of my actions as related to a goal. The information did not include value judgments or recommendations on how to improve. (For examples of information that is often falsely viewed as feedback, see "Feedback vs. Advice" above and "Feedback vs. Evaluation and Grades" on p. 15.)

Decades of education research support the idea that by teaching less and providing more feedback, we can produce greater learning (see Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Hattie, 2008; Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). Compare the typical lecture-driven course, which often produces less-than-optimal learning, with the peer instruction model developed by Eric Mazur (2009) at Harvard. He hardly lectures at all to his 200 introductory physics students; instead, he gives them problems to think about individually and then discuss in small groups. This system, he writes, "provides frequent and continuous feedback (to both the students and the instructor) about the level of understanding of the subject being discussed" (p. 51), producing gains in both conceptual understanding of the subject and problem-solving skills. Less "teaching," more feedback equals better results.

Feedback Essentials

Whether feedback is just there to be grasped or is provided by another person, helpful feedback is goal-referenced; tangible and transparent; actionable; user-friendly (specific and personalized); timely; ongoing; and consistent.

1. Goal-Referenced

Effective feedback requires that a person has a goal, takes action to achieve the goal, and receives goal-related information about his or her actions. I told a joke-why? To make people laugh. I wrote a story to engage the reader with vivid language and believable dialogue that captures the characters' feelings. I went up to bat to get a hit. If I am not clear on my goals or if I fail to pay attention to them, I cannot get helpful feedback (nor am I likely to achieve my goals).

Information becomes feedback if, and only if, I am trying to cause something and the information tells me whether I am on track or need to change course. If some joke or aspect of my writing isn't working -a revealing, nonjudgmental phrase-I need to know.

Note that in everyday situations, goals are often implicit, although fairly obvious to everyone. I don't need to announce when telling the joke that my aim is to make you laugh. But in school, learners are often unclear about the specific goal of a task or lesson, so it is crucial to remind them about the goal and the criteria by which they should self-assess. For example, a teacher might say,

The point of this writing task is for you to make readers laugh. So, when rereading your draft or getting feedback from peers, ask, How funny is this? Where might it be funnier?

As you prepare a table poster to display the findings of your science project, remember that the aim is to interest people in your work as well as to describe the facts you discovered through your experiment. Self-assess your work against those two criteria using these rubrics. The science fair judges will do likewise.

2. Tangible and Transparent

Any useful feedback system involves not only a clear goal, but also tangible results related to the goal. People laugh, chuckle, or don't laugh at each joke; students are highly attentive, somewhat attentive, or inattentive to my teaching.

Even as little children, we learn from such tangible feedback. That's how we learn to walk; to hold a spoon; and to understand that certain words magically yield food, drink, or a change of clothes from big people. The best feedback is so tangible that anyone who has a goal can learn from it.

Alas, far too much instructional feedback is opaque, as revealed in a true story a teacher told me years ago. A student came up to her at year's end and said, "Miss Jones, you kept writing this same word on my English papers all year, and I still don't know what it means." "What's the word? " she asked. "Vag-oo," he said. (The word was vague!)

Sometimes, even when the information is tangible and transparent, the performers don't obtain it-either because they don't look for it or because they are too busy performing to focus on the effects. In sports, novice tennis players or batters often don't realize that they're taking their eyes off the ball; they often protest, in fact, when that feedback is given. (Constantly yelling "Keep your eye on the ball!" rarely works.) And we have all seen how new teachers are sometimes so busy concentrating on "teaching" that they fail to notice that few students are listening or learning.

That's why, in addition to feedback from coaches or other able observers, video or audio recordings can help us perceive things that we may not perceive as we perform; and by extension, such recordings help us learn to look for difficult-to-perceive but vital information. I recommend that all teachers videotape their own classes at least once a month. It was a transformative experience for me when I did it as a beginning teacher. Concepts that had been crystal clear to me when I was teaching seemed opaque and downright confusing on tape-captured also in the many quizzical looks of my students, which I had missed in the moment.

3. Actionable

Effective feedback is concrete, specific, and useful; it provides actionable information. Thus, "Good job!" and "You did that wrong" and B+ are not feedback at all. We can easily imagine the learners asking themselves in response to these comments, What specifically should I do more or less of next time, based on this information? No idea. They don't know what was "good" or "wrong" about what they did.

Actionable feedback must also be accepted by the performer. Many so-called feedback situations lead to arguments because the givers are not sufficiently descriptive; they jump to an inference from the data instead of simply presenting the data. For example, a supervisor may make the unfortunate but common mistake of stating that "many students were bored in class." That's a judgment, not an observation. It would have been far more useful and less debatable had the supervisor said something like, "I counted ongoing inattentive behaviors in 12 of the 25 students once the lecture was underway. The behaviors included texting under desks, passing notes, and making eye contact with other students. However, after the small-group exercise began, I saw such behavior in only one student."

Such care in offering neutral, goal-related facts is the whole point of the clinical supervision of teaching and of good coaching more generally. Effective supervisors and coaches work hard to carefully observe and comment on what they observed, based on a clear statement of goals. That's why I always ask when visiting a class, "What would you like me to look for and perhaps count?" In my experience as a teacher of teachers, I have always found such pure feedback to be accepted and welcomed. Effective coaches also know that in complex performance situations, actionable feedback about what went right is as important as feedback about what didn't work.

4. User-Friendly

Even if feedback is specific and accurate in the eyes of experts or bystanders, it is not of much value if the user cannot understand it or is overwhelmed by it. Highly technical feedback will seem odd and confusing to a novice. Describing a baseball swing to a 6-year-old in terms of torque and other physics concepts will not likely yield a better hitter. Too much feedback is also counterproductive; better to help the performer concentrate on only one or two key elements of performance than to create a buzz of information coming in from all sides.

Expert coaches uniformly avoid overloading performers with too much or too technical information. They tell the performers one important thing they noticed that, if changed, will likely yield immediate and noticeable improvement ("I was confused about who was talking in the dialogue you wrote in this paragraph"). They don't offer advice until they make sure the performer understands the importance of what they saw.

5. Timely

In most cases, the sooner I get feedback, the better. I don't want to wait for hours or days to find out whether my students were attentive and whether they learned, or which part of my written story works and which part doesn't. I say "in most cases" to allow for situations like playing a piano piece in a recital. I don't want my teacher or the audience barking out feedback as I perform. That's why it is more precise to say that good feedback is "timely" rather than "immediate."

A great problem in education, however, is untimely feedback. Vital feedback on key performances often comes days, weeks, or even months after the performance-think of writing and handing in papers or getting back results on standardized tests. As educators, we should work overtime to figure out ways to ensure that students get more timely feedback and opportunities to use it while the attempt and effects are still fresh in their minds.

Before you say that this is impossible, remember that feedback does not need to come only from the teacher, or even from people at all. Technology is one powerful tool-part of the power of computer-assisted learning is unlimited, timely feedback and opportunities to use it. Peer review is another strategy for managing the load to ensure lots of timely feedback; it's essential, however, to train students to do small-group peer review to high standards, without immature criticisms or unhelpful praise.

6. Ongoing

Adjusting our performance depends on not only receiving feedback but also having opportunities to use it. What makes any assessment in education formative is not merely that it precedes summative assessments, but that the performer has opportunities, if results are less than optimal, to reshape the performance to better achieve the goal. In summative assessment, the feedback comes too late; the performance is over.

Thus, the more feedback I can receive in real time, the better my ultimate performance will be. This is how all highly successful computer games work. If you play Angry Birds, Halo, Guitar Hero, or Tetris, you know that the key to substantial improvement is that the feedback is both timely and ongoing. When you fail, you can immediately start over-sometimes even right where you left off-to get another opportunity to receive and learn from the feedback. (This powerful feedback loop is also user-friendly. Games are built to reflect and adapt to our changing need, pace, and ability to process information.)

It is telling, too, that performers are often judged on their ability to adjust in light of feedback. The ability to quickly adapt one's performance is a mark of all great achievers and problem solvers in a wide array of fields. Or, as many little league coaches say, "The problem is not making errors; you will all miss many balls in the field, and that's part of learning. The problem is when you don't learn from the errors."

7. Consistent

To be useful, feedback must be consistent. Clearly, performers can only adjust their performance successfully if the information fed back to them is stable, accurate, and trustworthy. In education, that means teachers have to be on the same page about what high-quality work is. Teachers need to look at student work together, becoming more consistent over time and formalizing their judgments in highly descriptive rubrics supported by anchor products and performances. By extension, if we want student-to-student feedback to be more helpful, students have to be trained to be consistent the same way we train teachers, using the same exemplars and rubrics.

Progress Toward a Goal

In light of these key characteristics of helpful feedback, how can schools most effectively use feedback as part of a system of formative assessment? The key is to gear feedback to long-term goals.

Let's look at how this works in sports. My daughter runs the mile in track. At the end of each lap in races and practice races, the coaches yell out split times (the times for each lap) and bits of feedback ("You're not swinging your arms!" "You're on pace for 5:15"), followed by advice ("Pick it up-you need to take two seconds off this next lap to get in under 5:10!").

My daughter and her teammates are getting feedback (and advice) about how they are performing now compared with their final desired time. My daughter's goal is to run a 5:00 mile. She has already run 5:09. Her coach is telling her that at the pace she just ran in the first lap, she is unlikely even to meet her best time so far this season, never mind her long-term goal. Then, he tells her something descriptive about her current performance (she's not swinging her arms) and gives her a brief piece of concrete advice (take two seconds off the next lap) to make achievement of the goal more likely.

The ability to improve one's result depends on the ability to adjust one's pace in light of ongoing feedback that measures performance against a concrete, long-term goal. But this isn't what most school district "pacing guides" and grades on "formative" tests tell you. They yield a grade against recent objectives taught, not useful feedback against the final performance standards. Instead of informing teachers and students at an interim date whether they are on track to achieve a desired level of student performance by the end of the school year, the guide and the test grade just provide a schedule for the teacher to follow in delivering content and a grade on that content. It's as if at the end of the first lap of the mile race, My daughter's coach simply yelled out, " B+ on that lap!"

The advice for how to change this sad situation should be clear: Score student work in the fall and winter against spring standards, use more pre-and post-assessments to measure progress toward these standards, and do the item analysis to note what each student needs to work on for better future performance.

"But There's No Time!"

Although the universal teacher lament that there's no time for such feedback is understandable, remember that "no time to give and use feedback" actually means "no time to cause learning." As we have seen, research shows that less teaching plus more feedback is the key to achieving greater learning. And there are numerous ways-through technology, peers, and other teachers-that students can get the feedback they need.

So try it out. Less teaching, more feedback. Less feedback that comes only from you, and more tangible feedback designed into the performance itself. And, of course, send me some feedback on this article at gwiggins@authenticeducation.org.

Feedback vs. Advice

› You need more examples in your report.

› You might want to use a lighter baseball bat.

› You should have included some Essential Questions in your unit plan.

These three statements are not feedback; they're advice. Such advice out of the blue seems at best tangential and at worst unhelpful and annoying. Unless it is preceded by descriptive feedback, the natural response of the performer is to wonder, "Why are you suggesting this?"

As coaches, teachers, and parents, we too often jump right to advice without first ensuring that the learner has sought, grasped, and tentatively accepted the feedback on which the advice is based. By doing so, we often unwittingly end up unnerving learners. Students become increasingly insecure about their own judgment and dependent on the advice of experts-and therefore in a panic about what to do when varied advice comes from different people or no advice is available at all.

If your ratio of advice to feedback is too high, try asking the learner, "Given the feedback, do you have some ideas about how to improve?" This approach will build greater autonomy and confidence over the long haul. Once they are no longer rank novices, performers can often self-advise if asked to.

Feedback vs. Evaluation and Grades

› This is a weak paper.

› You got a C on your presentation.

› I'm so pleased by your poster!

These comments make a value judgment. They rate, evaluate, praise, or criticize what was done. There is little or no feedback here-no actionable information about what occurred. As performers, we only know that someone else placed a high or low value on what we did.

How might we recast these comments to be useful feedback? Tip: Always add a mental colon after each statement of value. For example,

"Good work: Your use of words was more precise in this paper than in the last one, and I saw the scenes clearly in my mind's eye."

"This is a weak paper: Almost from the first sentence, I was confused as to your initial thesis and the evidence you provide for it. In the second paragraph you propose a different thesis, and in the third paragraph you don't offer evidence, just beliefs."

You'll soon find that you can drop the evaluative language; it serves no useful function.

The most ubiquitous form of evaluation, grading, is so much a part of the school landscape that we easily overlook its utter uselessness as actionable feedback. Grades are here to stay, no doubt-but that doesn't mean we should rely on them as a major source of feedback.

References

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Hattie, J. (2008). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York: Routledge.

Mazur, E. (2009, January 2). Farewell, lecture? Science, 323, 50-51.

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Advice, evaluation, grades-none of these provide the descriptive information that students need to reach their goals. What is true feedback-and how can it improve learning?

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Effective feedback for language assessment

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Effective feedback for language assessment

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Effective feedback for language assessment

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Giving effective feedback that is constructive and useful is key

What?

The role of feedback for learners is critical in advancing language proficiency. Feedback should be provided in multiple forms including formative, summative and self-assessment. It should be specific, timely, spoken or written, and most importantly, relevant to learning goals and the targeted level of proficiency. The educator's role is to determine a learner's current level of proficiency, plan the next steps, and offer formative feedback and strategies to further language acquisition. The key is to give learners what they need in a timely fashion to improve and not to overwhelm them with too much feedback.

Formative feedback is designed to assess learners' progress toward learning targets during the learning process.

Summative feedback provides an assessment of student performance at the end of a learning cycle (unit, semester, program).

Reflective feedback invites learners to play an active role in self-evaluation of their performance. This self-assessment provides learners the opportunity to make the changes necessary to improve their language performance.

Giving appropriate feedback promotes student ownership and builds confidence as learners can identify those areas of strength and those areas of needed improvement. Learners can use formative feedback and instructor-provided strategies to make changes that impact their language performance. Without prompt feedback, learners are disconnected from the task and not motivated to improve. Learner self-assessment and reflection require learners to focus on their own learning, comparing their current performance with their past performance in order to reach their proficiency level targets. (To learn more about these targets see NCSSFL-ACTFL Can Do Statements, ACTFL Performance Descriptors for Language Learners.)

How?

Teachers should utilize feedback strategies throughout instruction to assess and inform learners of progress towards proficiency goals. Feedback can be oral or written and can be given in a variety of ways:

Formative Feedback (on-going feedback to improve language skills)

Teacher-provided and/or teacher-guided

Consistent, timely and specific

Relevant to learning targets based on a learner's current level of proficiency

Descriptive

Provided in student-friendly language (free of jargon)

Summative Feedback (feedback on an end assessment)

Teacher-provided and/or teacher-guided

Given at the end of a learning sequence

Measurement of a learner's current language performance

Evaluative

Reflective Feedback (self-assessment)

Teacher designed, but learner-driven

Opportunities occur at the beginning of, during, and after a learning sequence

Develops learner awareness of language skills and current level of performance

Demonstrated through a variety of ways including, but not limited to:

Portfolios

Learner-written reflection of a specific performance

Surveys, questionnaires (Google forms)

Peer-assessments, co-constructed evaluations

Class discussion

One-on-one informal conversations or conferences

Formative checks, such as exit slips or stamp sheets

Technology can be used to support feedback. There are myriad options that could include:

Google Drive to create a portfolio

Survey and questionnaire forms to assess progress toward learning targets, comprehension of interpretive mode, self-check as students prepare presentational mode

Video- or audio-recording of a task to self-evaluate

Blogging or shared forum (i.e., Google chat) for peer or co-constructed discussion

Immediate feedback via technology (online practice that offers automatic feedback)

LinguaFolio®

Learn More About Guiding Principles

Language learning should be a central part of any curriculum. Here's why:

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world language teaching; language assessment; foreign language teaching

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Giving effective feedback that is constructive and useful is key

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How Strong Are Your Feedback Skills?

Pause for a minute to consider the two different pieces of feedback below. Apart from the length, what sets these comments apart? Which piece of feedback is more useful for a budding student writer? Why?

Example No. 1: "You didn't fully address the prompt in your thesis."

Example No. 2: "Make sure to tie everything back to your thesis. While your points on the National Bank are good, the example of the Trail of Tears does not seem relevant to your thesis about the common man."
When comparing the two, here are a few considerations:

Example 2 directly references the student work so it's personalized and specific.

Example 2 pinpoints examples to make the feedback extra clear and actionable.

By including something the student did well as well as something she needs to work on, example 2 is positively framed and balanced.

Example 1 is vague. The student probably thought she did address the prompt, so this feedback doesn't help the student understand her error or the steps she can take to grow and improve.

The 7 Hallmarks of Effective Feedback

Providing effective feedback to students is a teachable skill that can be acquired and improved through practice and coaching. It's vital to strengthen this skill because effective feedback leads to higher test scores in the short term and lower failures, better attendance, and fewer suspensions in the long term. Good feedback supports every other effort in curriculum, assessment, and teaching!

At Marco Learning, we use a standard framework to teach, provide, and evaluate effective feedback. Our framework is adapted from renowned educator Grant Wiggins' article, "The Seven Keys of Effective Feedback" and is thoughtfully designed to serve as a handy guide for all teachers looking to improve their feedback skills.

To be most effective, written feedback must display these 7 Hallmarks
#1: GOAL-ORIENTED
Feedback on student work should be tied to specific and measurable learning goals, skills, or standards. When giving feedback, it's important to link your comments to the expectations laid out in the assignment prompt and rubric. That way, you and your students have a clear and mutual understanding of the expectations and a common language to discuss their performance in relation to the expectations.

Directly reference the prompt and rubric components, using similar language when possible. Feedback should serve to help students understand where they are in relation to the stated goals, including what they're doing well and where they need to keep practicing.

Teacher Tip: To learn more about why and how to effectively use rubric language in your feedback, read our guide where we cover three important topics:

1. Using a rubric to remain objective and goal-oriented in your feedback

2. Using a rubric to help focus and prioritize your feedback to students

3. Using a rubric to help make your comments actionabl e and ensure students have a roadmap for success

#2: PRIORITIZED
Feedback should be concise and focused on the areas of strength and areas of growth that will have the greatest impact on a student's writing. It isn't feasible or advisable to provide feedback on every aspect of a student's work. That level of feedback would be incredibly overwhelming and demoralizing for even the stronger writers, let alone your struggling kiddos!

Concise, prioritized feedback is more digestible for students and easier to internalize and implement. Whenever you're reading a piece of writing, you will have to make judgment calls on where to focus your comments. Make your selections with the goal of the essay in mind. What are the most foundational and critical aspects of the writing process that this student needs to continue working on? Kristina Robertson, a veteran educator from Roseville, MN, wrote an article suggesting that teachers "focus on one or two concepts at a time when listening to or reading student work." You don't have to cover everything!

Teacher Tip: As a general rule, we recommend focusing on the "big picture concerns" like thesis, organization, evidence, analysis, and development before focusing on the finer points of voice, style, grammar, and conventions. This is always a judgment call, of course, but you don't want to get hung up on comma splices and typos when half of the class hasn't addressed the prompt in their thesis!
#3: ACTIONABLE
Feedback should be so specific that your students immediately know how to take action. Your comments should clearly describe their individual successes and shortfalls and directly reference their work in order to point the student to his or her next steps. To advance students' metacognition and enable them to self-assess their work, ask probing questions that will spark thoughtful reflection and a new understanding of how to develop their work.

It's imperative that you avoid broad and vague feedback, as this will only lead to student frustration, confusion, and stagnation. Some teachers fall into the trap of making their comments really broad because they think that will be most broadly helpful for the future or allow their student to make bigger, higher-impact changes...but the opposite is often true!

If the task is too big, students won't know where to start. Even if a student isn't revising this particular piece of work, specific examples will help them reflect on their work and understand exactly what they did well or exactly what could have been stronger, and how. They'll have an easier time understanding how to apply your comments to future writing.
Teacher Tip:

Use quotes and paraphrase from student work to provide illustrative examples when you can. In-line comments are great for this!

Ask specific probing questions and include narrative comments to get the student thinking in the right direction. This is a particularly effective tool for helping students develop their analysis. Why did you include this quote? What does it tell us about the author's motivation?? You lost me here... how does this tie back to your main argument? I'd love to hear more from you on this point! How could you take your analysis further to really drive your argument home?

Keep your feedback balanced. Make your positive feedback ("glows" or areas of strength) just as specific as your constructive feedback ("grows" or areas for growth). This will help students see exactly what they've done well, repeat good habits in the future, and feel motivated to keep writing!

Assume that students are doing their best! If they didn't do something, it's likely because they didn't know how to do it well. Feedback that just restates assignment expectations isn't as helpful as feedback that digs into the HOW and WHY.

When giving feedback, think of yourself as a guide or coach, not an editor. Your job isn't to correct your student's writing; your job is to help guide and support your student on their path to becoming a more confident, competent writer. When reading your feedback, students should immediately know their next step for improvement! #4 STUDENT-FRIENDLY
Feedback should be personalized and engaging to ensure it reaches the student. To aid student acceptance of feedback, respond like a reader who is seeking to understand what the student has written. An encouraging, positive tone will go far in helping students accept your feedback and apply it to future work. Be sure to use language that is clear and not too technical so that students can understand and internalize the feedback on their own.

Teacher Tip: Accommodate your feedback! Students with disabilities, diverse learners, and English Language Learners may be reading and writing at a different level than their peers. Keep this in mind when you are composing your feedback and always consider your sentence structure, word choice, vocabulary, and length of feedback. It is important that your feedback is accessible to every student so they can independently apply it on future assignments. For more on giving English Language Learners effective feedback, read our post on supporting ELLs here.

Keep in mind that students with disabilities are often the students who will benefit most from high-quality feedback when it is ongoing, consistent, and timely. Even more so than general education students, these students need to be made aware of what specific goals they should be working on and how they can master them, within their own capabilities. John O'Connor, a special education teacher and director with 30 years of experience, emphasizes that students with disabilities "need more Practice Turns and Feedback to master the same skills" but "typically get the least."

Students with IEPs and English Language Learners do not always receive the personalized attention that they need in general education classrooms, which can cause them to have a negative view of their school experience. This is where you come in! Providing these students with highlights of what they are doing well, as well as personalized and meaningful next-steps for them to take in order to increase their learning, has the potential to motivate students to continue working in an environment that may be new or different to them.

#5, 6, AND 7: ONGOING, CONSISTENT AND TIMELY
These three hallmarks go hand in hand. To be most effective, feedback must be ongoing, consistent, and timely. This means that students need ample opportunities to use feedback and that feedback must be accurate, trustworthy, and stable. When feedback isn't timely, students are disengaged and demotivated. As a teacher, your job is to build in regular feedback loops into your practice so that students get effective feedback throughout the year.

Teacher Tip: To be consistent, it is important to use consistent rubrics! While writing goals will vary from one prompt to the next and writing expectations will grow each year, you and your department can still use a consistent scoring framework, employ consistent language, and set clear and consistent expectations for your students around common writing goals.

If you aren't already using common rubrics as a department, I'd encourage you to visit our FREE teacher site, RubricCreator.com, to access our bank of standards-aligned rubrics, called PODS. PODS are built around 4 key writing components - Purpose, Organization, Development, and Style. We've created a number of different rubrics for various writing prompts based around this common PODS framework. You can use the PODS rubrics as is or edit them to meet your needs. RubricCreator.com makes it easy to share, edit, print, and create new rubrics from scratch.

Putting Pen to Paper

Effectively responding to student writing has never been more important. Writing is a foundational skill, critical for success in today's increasingly digital world. And just like any other skill, becoming a confident, competent writer requires ample amounts of practice and feedback.

The next time you give your students a writing assignment, I highly encourage you to practice your effective feedback skills. To check that a piece of feedback you are giving is effective, simply use the acronym GPAS (Goal-oriented, Prioritized, Actionable, and Student Friendly). These are four of the 7 hallmarks that apply to single pieces of feedback; ongoing, consistent, and timely feedback are bigger picture and more about your feedback process.

You can use our handy checklist to ensure that your feedback is goal-oriented, prioritized, actionable, and student-friendly. Trust us, your students will thank you for it!

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Putting the 7 Hallmarks of Effective Feedback to Work in Your Classroom - Marco Learning

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Take a closer look at what makes for truly great feedback and explore some strategies and best practices to ensure your students (and teachers!) always...

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How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students

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Done well, feedback from teachers to students addresses both cognitive and motivational factors. In this book for elementary school teachers, Brookhart, an educational consultant, categorizes important elements of feedback content (such as focus, comparison, clarity, and tone) and strategy (such ...

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What makes for effective feedback: staff and student perspectives

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What makes for effective feedback: staff and student perspectives

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What makes for effective feedback- staff and student perspectives

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#DitchBook Twitter chat

Feedback plays a crucial role in teaching and learning. We are constantly giving one another verbal and nonverbal feedback often without even realizing it. But giving intentional, meaningful feedback is a skill that we rely on to provide our students with checkpoints along their path towards a goal.

In an article published in ASCD.org, the late Grant Wiggins wrote about Seven Keys to Effective Feedback. These seven keys guided our discussion in a recent #Ditchbook Twitter chat as we tackled the topic of giving great feedback.

Educators shared their best tips for providing meaningful feedback along with the best tools out there to help us give feedback in a timely manner.

Check them out in the summary of this week's chat below! Also be sure to check out this Wakelet collection to see the whole discussion.
Related posts: Want to get in on the next #DitchBook Twitter chat?
Having trouble? Still unclear on how a Twitter chat works? Feel free to tweet to these #DitchBook ambassadors and they'll help - Karly Moura @karlymoura , Sean Fahey @seanjfahey , Sandy Otto @sandyrotto , Rachel Marker @rachelmarker , Evan Mosier @emosier3 , Mandi Tolen @TTmomTT , Craig Klement @craigklement , Tara Martin @taramartinedu , Krista Harmsworth @zonie71 , Anne Kamper @annekamper , Rayna Freedman @rlfreedm , Lance McClard @drmcclard , Stephanie DeMichele @sdemichele or David Platt @herrplatt!
For notifications of new Ditch That Textbook content and helpful links: Interested in having Matt present at your event or school? Contact him by e-mail! Matt is scheduled to present at the following upcoming events:
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©2020 Ditch That Textbook by Matt Miller.

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Providing powerful feedback in the classroom: Strategies, tips, and tools from fellow educators - Ditch That Textbook

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Feedback plays a crucial role in teaching and learning. We are constantly giving one another verbal and nonverbal feedback often without even realizing it. But giving intentional, meaningful feedback is a skill that we rely on to provide our students with checkpoints along their path towards a goal.

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Less Work, More Learning The Promise of Effective Feedback

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Less Work, More Learning The Promise of Effective Feedback

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Less Work, More Learning The Promise of Effective Feedback

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BETTER THAN OUR BIASES: USING PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH TO INFORM OUR APPROACH TO INCLUSIVE,EFFECTIVE FEEDBACK

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BETTER THAN OUR BIASES: USING PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH TO INFORM OUR APPROACH TO INCLUSIVE,EFFECTIVE FEEDBACK

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BETTER THAN OUR BIASES- USING PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH TO INFORM OUR APPROACH TO INCLUSIVE, EFFECTIVE FEEDBACK

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Creating a Supportive Classroom Environment Through Effective Feedback: Effects on Students’ School Identification and Behavioral Engagement

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Previous research revealed the connection between students’ behavioral and emotional engagement and a supportive classroom environment. One of the primary tools teachers have to create a supportive classroom environment is effective feedback. In this study, we assessed the supportive classroom envir…

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Instructors’ Perspectives of Challenges and Barriers toProviding Effective Feedback

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Instructors’ Perspectives of Challenges and Barriers toProviding Effective Feedback

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Instructors’ Perspectives of Challenges and Barriers to Providing Effective Feedback

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Students’ Perception of Learning ThroughTargeted Practice and Effective Feedback

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Students’ Perception of Learning ThroughTargeted Practice and Effective Feedback

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Students’ Perception of Learning ThroughTargeted Practice and Effective Feedback

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ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONOF EFFECTIVE FEEDBACK

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ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONOF EFFECTIVE FEEDBACK

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ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS’ PERCEPTION OF EFFECTIVE FEEDBACK