Research School Network: The Power of in lesson feedback Carmel Research School’s ELE, Vicky Cook, shares her experience on Verbal Feedback

Improving feedback should be a cost effective way to improve student learning by up to 8 months (EEF – Feedback).

One of the simplest ways to improve feedback is effective verbal feedback within the classroom. The impact that this can have is great and I would argue, verbal feedback is the most important kind of feedback…when done well.

Verbal feedback is effective as it is in the ​‘golden moment’ when the ​‘context is alive’ and when the students are ​‘in the flow’. It is happening all the time in lessons through teacher to student talk, student to teacher and student to student.

We need to consider several factors about verbal feedback. Firstly, at times we can give verbal feedback without really thinking about the impact it can have.

For example; someone shows you a photo from a while ago and your immediate response (that you say without thinking about the outcome) is ​‘wow, you were really pretty in that photo!’. The impact of your ​‘verbal feedback’ is immediate and cannot be withdrawn. With adults we may be able to talk our way out of the comment but students are much less forgiving!

Students response to verbal feedback depends on their level of self efficacy. This is the level of confidence we have in ourselves to reach our goals. This can affect student answers to our questions, motivation and effort.

For example a student with high self efficacy may be optimistic about their performance and find that negative feedback spurs them on.

However, a student with low self efficacy can react negatively to both positive and negative feedback, but could respond positively to ability or effort feedback- one to watch out for!

Building a positive classroom climate and effective learner behaviours can help you to try and predict the outcome of your feedback and ensure that you get the desired effect.

As teachers we need to train ourselves to be masters in uncovering student understanding. A way to help us with this is effective questioning and feeding back in such a way to deepen student responses.

Having a toolkit of questioning techniques within our lessons will help us with this. Techniques such as:

· Cold Calling

• No opt-out

• Say it again better

• Think, Pair, Share

• Whole class response

• Probing questions

can ensure that through questioning we can get feedback from the students as to their understanding of a topic or activity.

Tom Sherrington and Oliver Caviglioli’s Teaching Walkthrus book gives practical ideas of how to try and use these techniques effectively in the classroom and Tom Sherrington regularly updates his Teacherhead Blog with ideas and ways to enhance effective feedback in the classroom.

When giving any kind of feedback, we also need to consider how it could go wrong. We do not want students to become ​‘feedback junkies’ and this can all too easily happen using verbal feedback. Students can come to depend on you for the answers/​methods and this is not what effective feedback should offer.

There are times in a lesson when we should consider delaying feedback. I have delivered lessons where, after being set a task, I would give a set amount of time where I would refuse to speak/​answer questions to encourage students to think for themselves. I have also used the idea (pre-covid!) of giving students a set amount of counters and when they ask a question, they have to give me a counter, again making them think whether they really need to ask a question before they ask it.

When planning lessons, we should consider the understanding that we want to ensure that students have, and we should try and plan some questions to be asked that will elicit this understanding. We also need to be adaptable within the lesson if it needs to change course, but have to bare in mind the effect that verbal feedback can have both positively and negatively on students. Having a toolkit of techniques can help us to think on our feet to ensure that we use and gain verbal feedback effectively.

Feedback | Toolkit Strand | Education Endowment Foundation | EEF Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning | Education Endowment Foundation | EEF teacherhead | Zest for Learning… into the rainforest of teaching

John Hattie & Shirley Clarke (2019), Visible Learning | Feedback – Chapter 4, Oxon: Routledge

Tom Sherrington & oliver Caviglioli (2020), Teaching Walkthrus, John Catt