Research School Network: “Mic check – can someone please sort the feedback?” – part one Amarbeer Singh Gill sets up some important questions – ready to explore the answers in our 22/23 Spotlight Session on feedback.

I’ve come across various feedback policies during my time as a teacher and teacher educator.

I’ve noticed there were a number of important features of these policies, but one thing often missing was an answer to the questions of, ​“what does ​‘good’ feedback look like? How do I come up with it?”

And I think the answer lies in understanding the origins of the term.

The term ​‘feedback’ appears to have its origins in engineering. A critical idea here though is that feedback was not particularly useful in and of itself, but it was a key component of a feedback loop.

A classic example is that of a thermostat. A thermostat (crudely) works like this:

1. Set required temperature (desired state)
2. Measure current temperature (current state)
3. Compare current temperature with the required temperature (identify gap between current state and desired state)
4. Engage system that will bring the current state in line with the desired state (close the gap).

All four of these stages are critical – if any of them are missing we’re likely to bake/​freeze pretty quickly!

So, in order to support our students with effective feedback, just as with the thermostat, we also need to have a clearly defined desired state of what effective feedback looks like and an awareness of common pitfalls so that we can avoid them or pull ourselves out of them if need be.

We’ll be exploring what effective feedback looks like in the spotlight session, but for now we’re going to explore common practices that, whilst well intended, may not have the intended impact on students.

I want to preface this section by saying that, whilst all the examples I discuss below are things that I’ve experienced or seen in schools, they have always been done with the best of intentions.

We all want the best for our students and it’s absurd to suggest otherwise. Part of wanting the best means ruthlessly reflecting on each and every aspect of our practice – not because we need to change ​‘bad’ practices, but because wanting the best for our students means we owe it to them to ask, ​“is there something better? Is this the best possible thing?”

The feedback policies I mentioned earlier often fell foul of some common pitfalls. Let’s explore some of them.

A conflation between marking & feedback

The EEF guidance report on feedback found that marking was often conflated or used in priority over more helpful forms of feedback. A crucial mistake to make here is that it is not the marking that is in and of itself ​‘bad’. Instead, we should ask two questions:

1. Does the marking enable students to improve their learning?
2. In the time that was spent marking, was there an activity that teachers could’ve engaged in that would have been of more benefit for pupil learning?

This second one is particularly important. Marking is not done in isolation, it is often the end of a process which will involve extensive planning, teaching, assessing, and adapting.

So, the question is, if teachers have a given amount of time to do their work, would students benefit more from their teacher spending that time marking, or something else (eg lesson planning, engaging in PD)?

If we’re engaging in these activities because we want the best for our students, then it’s imperative we prioritise whatever activity will most benefit students.

Focusing on the form/​method of feedback

The perennial debate over whether spoken or written feedback is something that we’re not going to settle here, with the main reason being that any answer is unlikely to get us closer to what effective feedback looks like.

If my spoken feedback is unclear and goes off on a tangent it’s unlikely to be of more benefit than clear, concise written feedback. Conversely if my written feedback focuses on too many topics it probably would’ve been more effective to give students short bits of spoken feedback on fewer things at a time.

This leads to another common pitfall…

Not designing tasks with feedback in mind

Feedback (particularly written) is often given on relatively lengthy pieces of work (end of unit tests, mock exams, extended pieces of work etc). These pieces of work require a fair amount of knowledge from different areas, be that different topics or sub-topics in a test or exam, or knowledge about what to write as well as how to write.

In these situations, feedback often ends up having too many priorities and focuses on a lot of areas. Given what we know about working memory, namely that it is incredibly limited, feedback that focuses on too many things is unlikely to have the desired impact as it’s simply going to overwhelm students’ working memory.

So, we need to make sure that the activities we’ve given students facilitate the delivery and use of feedback.

Focusing on the frequency of feedback

What is hopefully becoming clear is that there is significant crossover between these pitfalls. The task design is likely to have an impact on how we deliver feedback, whether we conflate marking with feedback, and finally on how often we provide it.

If tasks are large, the feedback will take time to prepare and deliver and so it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to deliver it frequently. Instead, frequency should be trusted to teachers’ professional judgement, which can account for task design and method of delivery.

Principles over methods

So, what should we focus on instead? These principles of effective feedback:

1. Laying the foundations for effective feedback
2. Delivering feedback that focuses on moving learning forward
3. Planning for what pupils will do with the feedback

We’ll explore these in more detail in our spotlight session on Monday 21 November 2022.