Broken Pieces- # 4 by

theptc — 2021-07-01 01:22:25 UTC

Conversely, personalised evaluative feedback (either positive or negative) such as ‘you’re so smart’ or ‘I didn’t enjoy your essay’ makes students believe that the power to affect change lies outside of the learner’s direct control. Students may think ‘Perhaps I was just born smart or dumb….’ Or

‘perhaps my teacher just doesn’t like my work’. Such feedback is harmful to learning.

theptc — 2021-07-01 01:22:41 UTC

Feedback works at its best when it serves to bring the ‘next step’ into focus. Too many things to work on can be daunting for students. They may feel overwhelmed by the quantity of ‘things to fix’ or they may feel confused about which of these things is most important and where they should start. Skilled

teachers target only a small number of specific, attainable ‘next steps’ goals when giving feedback to students.

theptc — 2021-07-01 01:22:54 UTC

Retrieval (step one) works like this: Once something has been learned, the brain may be asked to ‘retrieve’ that information. This ‘retrieval’ of prior learning is made visible through student actions (e.g. answering a test question, playing a Db major scale, identifying cause and effect, shooting a basket etc.). What teachers think of as an ‘assessment’ is actually what

neuroscientists refer to as ‘retrieval’.

theptc — 2021-07-01 01:23:10 UTC

In the third step of the feedback loop, students internalise the feedback and make meaning. This is where new learning is beginning to happen. However that learning is NOT COMPLETE until the learner has RETRIEVED again

(this is step four of the feedback loop). In other words, it is not enough for a student to simply ‘think about’ or ‘describe’ what they might do differently next time…for learning to actually happen they MUST re-DO (i.e. second retrieval).

theptc — 2021-07-01 10:40:18 UTC

The first ‘big idea’ of Feedback is to focus on the learning, not on the person