Research School Network: Effective feedback – making steps concrete Ricky Cooksey considers how students act on feedback and how pupils can move from the ​‘current state’ to the ​‘goal state’.

The EEF guidance report on effective feedback contains lots of useful ideas and takeaways (some new, some tried and tested) but one in particular stands out:

The only thing that matters with feedback is what the students do with it.

It may sound simple, but this crucial component of feedback often gets overlooked. That is, how are the students moving themselves from the ​‘current state’ to the ​‘goal state’?

Whenever teachers leave feedback, they likely expect the learners to respond, but often their responses do not align with their expectations of what the work should look like.

Here’s an example of a common situation:

I recently had one such example with one of my year 11 students. They had just done some extended writing on Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and, having seen their paragraph was lacking some ideas about the author’s intentions, I decided that this is what I should focus my feedback on.

Beside their paragraph I wrote,​‘include some ideas on the author’s intentions’, which, in the moment, I felt constituted effective feedback.

I had been specific about what I wanted to see in the student’s work, so they should be able to produce something that aligns with my view of what the work should be… right?

Needless to say, the student struggled to respond to the prompt. And, if the only thing that matters with feedback is what students do with it, my feedback had clearly missed the mark.

The issue here is that whilst I knew what I wanted the work to look like, my student did not. My comment, whilst having been made with the best intentions, was rather vague and offered little instruction on how to implement it.

In short, I had not given any concrete steps for the student to take to help them bring their work closer to the goal state. I had essentially told them what the goal state was, without telling them how to get there.

Considering how a student can act on feedback

I was forced to reconsider my approach. In the example above, I realised I needed to go back to the drawing board and consider what the student needed to do next in order to produce the work I was hoping to see.

After some consideration, I was able to break it down into steps.

1. Firstly, I wanted them to think about the expectations of Victorian society, and the impact it had upon the characters.
2. Secondly, I wanted them to think about what Stevenson was trying to criticise by having the characters struggle to conform to these expectations.
3. Thirdly, I wanted them to take those ideas and implement them into a series of sentences, which they could add onto the end of the paragraph, thus​‘helping them include some ideas on the author’s intentions’.

By considering the steps I wanted them to take, I helped make things more explicit to the student. They were able to tackle the problem in a methodical and sequential way, rather than wrestling with my loose instruction of ​‘some ideas’.

The concrete steps we provide students with will no doubt look different for different tasks and subjects.

In my case it meant arming my students with more targeted prompts, some sentence starters and a bank of keywords to include, but the methodology of systematically breaking down the steps required to move the current state to the goal state should be the same.

To hear more insights on the EEF guidance report, as well practical recommendations for the classroom, join our free webinar on Using teacher feedback to support pupil progress taking place on November 14^th.