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METACOGNITION METACOGNITION: WHAT IS IT? WHY DOES IT MATTER? Literally, "metacognition" refers to a process coming "after" or "beyond" (meta-") the act of acquiring knowledge (cognition). It is "thinking about thinking," or the space beyond thinking where we can plan, monitor, and assess our efforts to think, know, or learn about something.

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Videos to support understanding Metacognition

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Videos to support understanding Metacognition

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SPARK - Teaching Students to Give Peer Feedback 

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SPARK - Teaching Students to Give Peer Feedback 

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Giving their classmates feedback on writing is a complex skill for students to master, but it can be taught with scaffolded modeling.

Bob Daemmrich / Alamy Stock Photo

When I first share with my ninth graders that peer review will be part of our writing process, the response is almost universally negative. Unfortunately, many of my writers have not had the best experience with this activity.

My stronger writers say that they almost never receive feedback that goes beyond basic conventions, while my emerging writers say they feel a lack of confidence in providing feedback beyond basic conventions. This frustration should be no surprise: As educators, we recognize that effective teaching is a complex skill that requires deliberate practice. Likewise, when we ask students to give each other feedback, this too is more complex than simply exchanging papers and locating errors.

To make peer feedback more focused and meaningful, I've found it helpful to define quality feedback, provide structured routines, and teach feedback as I would any other core skill.

Defining Effective Feedback

In my experience, few high school freshmen have mastered the conventions of writing well enough to function as reliable editors. For this reason, I direct my students to reflect upon each other's work-not correct it.

This is confusing because I cannot follow your topic.

I am confused about who "they" are in this sentence.

Explain a little more about why you chose this example from the text.

I like how you repeated key words from your hook here in your conclusion.

My students focus on idea development, clarity, and arrangement to make sense of the writer's text. Of course, scrambled grammar can impact a reader's experience, but rather than have them try to correct a peer's confounding syntax with editing marks, I ask students to write full sentences to one another:

Specific: Comments are linked to a discrete word, phrase, or sentence.

Prescriptive: Like a medical prescription that aims to solve an ailment, prescriptive feedback offers a solution or strategy to improve the work, including possible revisions or links to helpful resources or examples.

Actionable: When the feedback is read, it leaves the peer knowing what steps to take for improvement.

Referenced: The feedback directly references the task criteria, requirements, or target skills.

Kind: It's mandatory that all comments be framed in a kind, supportive way.

I also offer kids a specific acronym to remember what constitutes quality feedback: SPARK. For feedback to be useful to a writer, it should meet as many of these criteria as possible:

Some groups I've taught took to SPARK quickly, while others have needed more practice. For these groups, I create student-friendly versions of a consultancy protocol or tuning protocol to ensure focused discourse, allowing room for all voices.

I also set a guideline for a minimum number of quality comments, but I tell students that less is often more.

Modeling SPARK Feedback

As with any other skill I teach, I begin by modeling SPARK feedback on sample student writing. I interact with students, explaining my thought process as they help pinpoint what about a text is effective or ineffective, as well as how to offer quality SPARK-based comments. From there, as a class we examine other example feedback statements before evaluating their potential usefulness to a writer.

To also give students the chance to practice giving feedback independently, I distribute the same example paragraph. We use group and class discussions to share the variety of feedback offered.

When it's time for live peer review, I assess performance by giving students feedback on their feedback. After that, students share particularly useful examples. Before students leave class, they share on exit tickets what they feel was the best feedback they offered, as well as the best feedback they received.

In the end, good peer review should provide the writer with meaningful information for improvement, while developing the reviewer's ability to analyze a text's effectiveness.

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Giving their classmates feedback on writing is a complex skill for students to master, but it can be taught with scaffolded modeling.

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Moving from Feedback to Feed-Forward - Cult of Pedagogy

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Moving from Feedback to Feed-Forward - Cult of Pedagogy

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Listen to my interview with Joe Hirsch (transcript):
Sponsored by Kiddom and Pear Deck

As teachers, we pretty much give feedback all day long. We tell students how they can improve on assignments, we praise them for things they're doing well, we correct their incorrect responses, and we redirect them when they behave in ways that aren't helpful to learning.

And that's just the students. We also give feedback to our colleagues, although in most cases, these exchanges don't happen as often or as freely as they probably should. We receive plenty of feedback as well, from our students, their parents, our administrators, and our peers. And we encourage our students to give feedback to each other, albeit with pretty uneven results. Really, the experience of school could be described as one long feedback session, where every day, people show up with the goal of improving, while other people tell them how to do it.

And it doesn't always go well. As we give and receive feedback, people get defensive. Feelings get hurt. Too often, the improvements we're going for don't happen, because the feedback isn't given in a way that the receiver can embrace.

It turns out there's a different way to give feedback that works a lot better, a way of flipping its focus from the past to the future. It's a concept called "feedforward," which was originally developed by a management expert named Marshall Goldsmith. As far as I can tell, not a lot of educators are familiar with the practice of feedforward, and I really think if we learned how to do it and started using it more consistently, it could make a huge difference in how our students grow and how we grow as professionals.

In this week's podcast, I interview Joe Hirsch, author of The Feedback Fix: Dump the Past, Embrace the Future, and Lead the Way to Change. ( Bookshop.org | Amazon). In the book, Joe digs deep into the practice of feedforward and shows us how and why it works. You can listen to our full conversation in the player above, read the full transcript, or stay right here-I'll give you a quick overview.

What's Wrong with the Way We Give Feedback?

When we give feedback to our students, or when our co-workers or administrators give feedback to us, the focus is on the past. "People can't control what they can't change, and we can't change the past," says Hirsch. "And that happens to be the focus of most of the feedback that we give or receive."

More specifically, backward-looking feedback doesn't often get good results for three reasons:

It shuts down our mental dashboards. "When we get negative feedback about something that we can't change or control," Hirsch says, "our brains flood with stress-inducing hormones, cortisol, that trigger our threat awareness and put us on the defensive. The parts that are responsible for executive function, for creativity, the parts that allow us to sort of set our agendas and make rational decisions, essentially we are in a state of mental paralysis."

It focuses primarily on ratings, not on development. Most of feedback's time and energy is spent on looking back and rating (or grading) performance that's already over, rather than focusing on what can be done from now on. "When feedback consists of an impersonal set of performance standards, we're overlooking the essential goal of feedback, and that's to create positive and lasting improvement."

It reinforces negative behaviors. "When we hear about flaws that we can't fix anymore-because they're in a past that we can't change-it creates a feeling of learned helplessness, the feeling that we are unable to do anything about our future. Instead of committing ourselves to improvement, which is what we would hope would happen, we hold onto this debilitating view of who we are instead of focusing on who we are becoming."

What is Feedforward?

When we give feedforward, instead of rating and judging a person's performance in the past, we focus on their development in the future.

Suppose my student is writing an essay. Instead of waiting until she is finished, then marking up all the errors and giving it a grade, I would read parts of the essay while she is writing it, point out things I'm noticing, and ask her questions to get her thinking about how she might improve it.

In his book, Hirsch takes this broad concept of feedforward and defines six components of it, six specific characteristics of feedforward that make it so effective. He refers to these by the acronym REPAIR (regenerates, expands, particular, authentic, impact, refines).

So let's take a look at each of these. If you want to implement feedforward well, it should have these attributes:

It REGENERATES talent.

The most effective kind of feedforward helps people see opportunities for growth-ways they could take on new opportunities and roles. "At the simplest level," Hirsch writes in his book, "it leads to the unmistakable feeling that we're moving forward in our professional and personal lives. Getting positive feedback about our performance may feel good, but it doesn't break new ground. It merely confirms what we already know about ourselves and our talents, essentially holding our growth in check. But when feedback gets us thinking about how to spread that talent to others, it has a multiplying effect."

So when we notice that a student is developing a strength or an interest in an area, instead of just pointing that out, we might give the student an opportunity to enter their work in some kind of competition, publish it in some way, or share it with others in a presentation, rather than simply keeping it to themselves. This helps students see themselves in a new light and gets them thinking about ways they could grow.

It EXPANDS possibilities.

Effective feedback starts with what is and helps add to it, expanding what's possible, rather than simply pointing out problems. In his book, Hirsch describes a concept used by Pixar studios called "plussing." When Pixar's creators get together to review a day's work, they are expected to give each other feedback to improve the work. What makes these sessions so effective is one important rule: Participants can't point out a problem without proposing an alternative, saying "What if?" to a problem.

This concept of "plussing" could work wonders in staff or committee meetings: When we are discussing possible solutions to an issue, rather than shooting down ideas that might not work, we could add to them by making small tweaks. "That's an interesting idea. What if we made this small change and tried that?" This technique would also work beautifully with project-based learning tasks, when students may need to come up with several ideas for solving a problem before arriving at the best solution.

It is PARTICULAR.

Far too often, feedback is given in an "information dump," with lots of criteria being measured and reported on at the same time. This can be a pretty ineffective way to help people grow. "There's a limit to how much we can absorb and operationalize in any given time," Hirsch says. "Feedforward is really about picking your battlegrounds strategically and selectively." He advises us to make feedback an ongoing process that is embedded in the day-to-day work, and to only focus on a few things at a time.

So rather than wait until an assignment is done to point out all the ways a student can improve, find ways to give them specific pointers while they work, and only one thing at a time, so students can process and act on it right away.

It is AUTHENTIC.

No one particularly likes giving criticism. "We see problems, we see pitfalls in other people, and we know it's a problem," Hirsch says, "but we don't want to be mean, right? We don't want to crush them. So the tendency is to either avoid giving feedback altogether or to disguise it as a praise sandwich, where we basically slip one piece of criticism in between two very, very surface level gauzy praises."

The problem with that approach, Hirsch explains, is what's called the recency effect: People remember most the thing they heard last. So when you tack on some praise after delivering constructive feedback, the person doesn't really absorb the critical part as well as they would if you'd just given it to them more directly.

Hirsch recommends a more direct approach: Describe what's happening, explain why it's a problem, then prompt the person for a solution. "When delivered this way," Hirsch explains, "it puts people at ease, it takes them off the defensive. It is clear, it is concise, it's locating the problem, it's looking for solutions together. People don't want a praise sandwich. People want the truth."

This approach could work with academic situations or classroom management problems: If you're dealing with a student who is disrupting class, describe the behavior you're seeing, explain why it's a problem, then ask the student for ideas on how to solve it. It sounds really simple, but if what you're doing right now isn't giving you the results you want, it's worth a try.

It has IMPACT.

One of the reasons people don't make progress after receiving feedback is that they don't necessarily know what to do with it. "If you want feedback to make an impact," Hirsch notes, "you have to put it in terms that people can operationalize." In his book, he cites studies showing that regular feedback doesn't typically result in a transfer of new skills or habits, but when that feedback is combined with coaching, the transfer skyrockets to 95 percent.

So if a student regularly forgets to bring materials to class, rather than simply telling him to change, help him make a specific plan for improvement. Ideally, that plan should have lots of small steps to make it achievable, and the student should take the lead in developing that plan.

It REFINES group dynamics.

"Feedback is a team sport," Hirsch says. "It is not just something that happens one to one. It happens in groups and across and within organizations. And when we dump that command and control nature of traditional feedback, we make room for something much more collaborative and shared."

So rather than give feedback in a top-down, hierarchical model, open up more pathways for people to get feedback from their peers, even those whose jobs might on the surface have little in common with our own. In his book, Hirsch borrows a term from management circles known as "creative abrasion," which is what happens when people with opposing views work on the same task together. Although it can result in more conflict, the contributions from different points of view usually produce a higher-quality product in the end.

This idea can play out in a lot of educational settings: Instead of just having our department head observe our teaching, why not get feedback from someone who teaches a completely different subject? When students go to the same peers for feedback on their work, have them seek out the opinion of someone new, or consider getting the input of a group of students from a different class or grade level entirely.

There's nothing simple or straightforward about telling people how to improve. So it's no surprise that we're still figuring it out and finding new ways to refine it. If the feedback you're giving to your students, your coworkers, and even the people at home isn't having quite the effect you intend, try shifting to a feedforward approach. Doing so can help us, as Hirsch says, stop seeing ourselves just as who we are, but who we are becoming. ♦

Learn more about Joe Hirsch on his website or visit his LinkedIn page. Teachers who read The Feedback Fix should also grab this free Discussion Guide for Teachers to help apply the book's principles to your own work.

Come back for more.
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Instead of rating and judging a person's performance in the past, feedforward focuses on their development in the future.

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Putting into Practice: Continuously Refine Your Practice With Student Feedback

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Putting into Practice: Continuously Refine Your Practice With Student Feedback

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A few weeks into each semester, Gayle Golden asks her University of Minnesota journalism students to answer a few brief, anonymous questions about the course she teaches. After examining responses, she discusses the results with her students during the next class.

"She tells them which suggestions she plans to put into practice, which recommendations she can't act on, and why," writes Rebecca Koenig for EdSurge. Says Golden: "If they told me something like, 'I want no deadlines,' I will say: 'I heard a call for no deadlines, I understand deadlines are hard, but I can't do that in this class, and the reason is this-sorry.' By saying that, I have told them I have heard them."

Known as early-term feedback, the practice is a quick temperature check that can "unearth a trove of useful information," including a teacher's blind spots or classroom logistics and protocols that students find confusing or inefficient. Adapted to middle and high school classrooms, it's a powerful-and even continuous-way to gather student input to quickly refine and improve teaching and learning at either the class or lesson level. Feedback can be done very simply online or via pencil and paper, for example, and should always focus on giving students an opportunity to voice their concerns, needs, and thinking about their learning, the class, and how it's being taught.

Because the feedback protocol generally includes time dedicated to closing the loop with students-with the teacher addressing feedback in class and then strategically implementing some changes-it's also a valuable tool for building a positive, respectful learning environment. "Not only does the process of gathering and incorporating student feedback offer an opportunity to improve a course before too much time has passed," notes Koenig, "it can also change the tone and culture of a classroom, enabling a [teacher] to demonstrate to students that she values their perspectives."

The Purpose of Student Surveys

When the authors of a 2019 study conducted in-depth interviews with award-winning instructors of online courses, they found that a significant part of what set these educators apart from less successful instructors was their emphasis on the use of "data for continuous improvement." The instructors, the researchers found, routinely collected feedback from students to gain insight into what was working or not and where obstacles might exist for students. The data they collected would then be used for "immediate and remedial action," the study authors note. And while these instructors worked in a remote environment, the data they were looking for is applicable to in-person learning as well.

Christopher Pagan, a physics teacher at Trinidad Garza Early College High School in Dallas, Texas, began surveying his students because they were having a hard time learning the materials, weren't turning in assignments, and often skipped the opportunity to take make-up tests. He wanted them to reflect on what would improve their learning experience so that he could understand what he might change.

Pagan developed a 5-minute survey for students to fill out in class-the results were illuminating. "He got the information back, changed how he taught, and changed how he tutored," says Dr. Janice Lombardi, the school's principal. "As a result, last year, his students' physics scores phenomenally increased," and the school made student surveys a "best practice" that all teachers implement twice a year.

Asking Good Questions

To get the most out of the process, questions should stay focused on instruction, Pagan advises, because "the purpose of this survey is to give my students a voice to tell me what changes I can make and what practices I can implement to help them perform better in class. It has nothing to do with content." So if there's a specific problem area in your class, like homework and quizzes, for example, questions might include: "Do you turn your homework in on time? If so, or if not, why?" Or, "How do you perform on tests and quizzes? If you don't do well, why is that? If you do well, why is that?" Consider including a few open-ended questions to "surface problem areas that you didn't think about," Pagan suggests.

When Golden surveys her University of Minnesota class, she asks them three simple questions:

What should keep happening in this class?

What should we start doing in this class?

What should we stop doing in this class?

For a middle- or high school survey, here are examples of typical student survey questions published by organizations such as Harvard University's Making Caring Common Project, EduCause, and the Hawaii Department of Education:

Are assignments clear? Are you able to access them?

Do you feel like your voice is heard?

Do you feel like you belong in the classroom?

What can I do to improve our classroom?

Modeling Useful Feedback

At first, students might feel nervous about delivering honest feedback to teachers, so it's important to briefly explain the process and its value to them as students-and to you as the teacher-emphasizing that it's an opportunity to use their voices in a respectful way to impact their experience and success as learners. You might model how to deliver productive feedback, perhaps suggesting a few sentence starters in the survey to help them get started. For example, "It would be helpful for me if my teacher spent more/less time doing..." or "I struggle to complete homework on time because..." Remind students that the survey is anonymous so that they feel comfortable being honest.

To encourage students to offer relevant, constructive feedback, rather than personal or off-topic comments, formulate questions so that they're emphasizing the central idea of "What helps you learn?" And then be sure to "frame it upfront that [you] care about what the students are experiencing and want to make changes," says Kris Gorman, an education program specialist at the University of Minnesota's Center for Education Innovation.

Making Sure You're Ready to Implement It

It's frustrating to give thoughtful feedback and then never hear back. Before you get started, be honest with yourself about whether you have the bandwidth to engage in the whole survey process, including closing the loop with students and proposing and taking action on next steps. "I've always encouraged people to only collect feedback if you are ready to take action on it," Gorman tells Koenig. "If you don't have capacity, the worst thing you can do is collect feedback and not be willing to do anything to change."

Regardless of how carefully you position the survey and explain its purpose to students, be prepared, as well, to hear negative feedback. If student feedback feels especially difficult or negative, try to "take what's actionable, leave what's emotional," Gorman suggests. "It's like any relationship; you have to ask 'What's up?' and talk about it truthfully. You'll find if you start to do that, the likelihood is you're going to improve the situation."

Finally, keep in mind that not all survey results that have merit require immediate action. In fact, acting on all feedback not only is impossible but also can destabilize your classroom routines and disrupt learning. Be judicious and consider selecting only the top one or two high-impact changes that you can reasonably implement in the classroom. Keep the rest for later; there will be plenty of time to make tweaks as the school year progresses.

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Continuously Refine Your Practice With Student Feedback

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A few weeks into each semester, Gayle Golden asks her University of Minnesota journalism students to answer a few brief, anonymous questions about the course she teaches. After examining responses, she discusses the results with her students during the next class.

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How to Integrate effective Feedback Into Your Classroom (Feed-Forward)

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How to Integrate effective Feedback Into Your Classroom (Feed-Forward)

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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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Using Formative Assessment to Inform Teaching and Learning

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Using Formative Assessment to Inform Teaching and Learning

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Using Formative Assessment to Inform Instructional Steps

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Whole Class Feedback: Powerful Questions

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Whole Class Feedback: Powerful Questions

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Peer Feedback: Scaffolding for Student Success 

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Peer Feedback: Scaffolding for Student Success 

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Peer Coaching and Self Reflection Strategies and Templates To access you must be logged in: https://aac.ab.ca/materials/scaffolding/

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Putting It Into Practice: Suggestions for getting students to put the feedback into practice

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Putting It Into Practice: Suggestions for getting students to put the feedback into practice

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Putting feedback into practice -Teaching Kids to Give and Receive Quality Peer Feedback

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Putting feedback into practice -Teaching Kids to Give and Receive Quality Peer Feedback

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Jamie Kobs knows the value of giving students timely and meaningful feedback, but she often struggled with the volume of incoming assignments. Then she discovered a solution: her students. Feedback didn't always need to come directly from her, the veteran high school English teacher realized. In fact, if she taught kids the skills to deliver constructive, focused feedback, it could be equally meaningful coming from fellow classmates.

"Besides relieving me of some of the pressure, creating a classroom culture where students give each other feedback has helped me increase engagement and build community," Kobs says. "Having more frequent interactions among students builds rapport and trust and disrupts the idea that I'm the only expert in the room."

A high-functioning feedback culture also frees up teachers to give more low-stakes assignments, creates more opportunities for students to practice, and democratizes the creative process-replacing the top-down dynamics of more typical classrooms and making kids an equal and accountable part of learning outcomes for everyone. Kids who frequently draw, create podcasts, or write fiction with the expectation that their peers will be consuming it, and who are themselves expected to provide useful feedback, are more likely to be attuned to the elements that make art or stories truly outstanding and "feel more seen, heard, valued, and, consequently, engaged in their work," according to Kobs.

But the middle and high school years can be a difficult time for students when it comes to peer evaluation-some initial reluctance is normal. Research shows that adolescents are hypersensitive to criticism, and when they feel judged, they can become self-conscious, stressed, or withdrawn. Other students may feel tentative or shy about giving feedback to peers they admire, and for English language learners, the process might feel especially daunting.

Developing a culture of feedback must therefore happen in tandem with creating a safe and supportive classroom. By scaffolding the feedback process in a classroom where kids feel valued and empowered-the effort requires "consistent modeling, repetition, and a commitment to sharing the feedback with students," says Kobs-even teens can become more comfortable with the act of giving and receiving peer feedback.

Here are six considerations for creating a culture of feedback in the classroom.

Encourage reflection, not correction: Consider limiting feedback cycles to work products that are not highly structured, or that require granular feedback related to syntax, grammar, and spelling. When students in Mark Gardner's high school English class provide feedback, he encourages them to focus on collectively reflecting, not correcting, each other's work. Very few incoming high school students have mastered the conventions of writing well enough to be reliable copy editors, he says. Rather than correcting syntax errors, Gardner wants his students to focus on providing feedback that outlines clear next steps that peers can take toward improvement.

"My students focus on idea development, clarity, and arrangement to make sense of the writer's text," he explains. He asks students to write full sentences in their observations like, "I am confused about who 'they' are in this sentence" or "I like how you repeated keywords from your hook here in your conclusion."

Assign feedback partners: To prevent students from worrying about evaluating friends, high school history and government teacher Benjamin Barbour recommends assigning partners instead of letting kids choose who to critique in the class. Once students are working in pairs, consider allowing them to share feedback with each other rather than with the whole class, making it a generally less stressful experience for kids.

Offer choices: Including an element of choice in the feedback process can build student agency and motivation, writes educator Dr. Catlin Tucker in her blog. A peer feedback choice board, for example, allows students to select prompts that provide direction and context for delivering feedback that's "specific, meaningful, and kind," Tucker notes.
Courtesy of Dr. Catlin Tucker
For English language learners, teachers can create choice boards "with sentence frames to provide students with additional support as they give each other focused feedback," Tucker writes. "For example, under the box labeled 'Greatest Strength,' teachers could rework that as a series of fill-in-the-blank statements. The strongest part of this draft was ______. I thought ______ was done well. I really liked ______."

Deliver feedback that is specific: Emphasize the idea that criticism must be both constructive and specific in nature in order to be helpful. English language arts specialist Katherine James says that students often leave general or vague feedback like "I really enjoyed your story."

Instead, encourage kids to be focused and specific with their feedback. "Give examples of what specific feedback sounds like-for example: I really liked your simile 'the rain hit the pavement like arrows' because it helped me visualize the setting," rather than the more general 'I liked your description,'" James says.

Specificity counts in oral feedback too, and scaffolding student responses is equally important. After Socratic seminars or academic discussions in her classroom, Kobs directs students to "give a specific example of something someone else said during this discussion that resonated with you," and "explain why it stuck with you."

Model feedback, and suggest sentence starters: During the brainstorming stage of a personal narrative assignment in her high school English classroom, Kobs's students pitch ideas via Flipgrid videos. Students then watch and respond to the pitches of two classmates with the help of sentence starters.

To ensure that the feedback cycle is targeted and productive, Kobs and her colleagues "model both the pitch and the response steps with videos of our own" and provide sentence starters to help kids focus on the most important aspects of the piece and clarify how to deliver their feedback. Sentence starters might prompt students to say, "I didn't get the part about...," pose questions or suggestions out of curiosity like "What happened next?" or "Maybe you can try...," or make connections: "Something similar happened to me when..."

Prompt deeper engagement: Consider trying an "I like, I wish, I wonder" framework as another way to help focus students on content rather than grammar and spelling errors. It encourages them to interact creatively with their peers' work, says James, and encourages critical thinking as students try to provide meaningful feedback.

"When reading each other's work and giving feedback, they must discuss one thing they liked about the other person's work, one thing they wished that person had done differently, and one thing they wondered about (for example, how a main character felt about or reacted to an event)," she explains.

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Teaching Kids to Give and Receive Quality Peer Feedback

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Building a classroom culture of feedback requires scaffolding and a safe, nurturing environment, but it's worth the effort, teachers say.

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Developing the Skill of Self Reflection 

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Developing the Skill of Self Reflection 

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To view the video and resource page go to : https://aac.ab.ca/video/developing-the-skill-of-self-reflection/

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Student Led Conferences and Digital Portfolios

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Student Led Conferences and Digital Portfolios

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Student Engagement: Student Led Conferences

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Student Engagement: Collaborative Group Work

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Student Engagement : Fostering Curiosity and Inquiry

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Student Engagement - Formative Assessment Foundations

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Key Visual (2017)