Research School Network: Feedback What to consider for remote learning

by Karen Roskilly – Research Lead

This is a short blog explaining more about the series of ​‘Seven Research Informed Pedagogies for Remote Learning’ published recently by the Sandringham EdTech Demonstrator School. This is a series of documents about recommended pedagogies and related teaching and learning strategies which are helpful for remote teaching.

The resources can be found here: https://www.sandagogy.co.uk/remote-learning-evidence-informed-pedagogy/.

The focus of this post is feedback (page 3).

Providing effective feedback that moves learning forwards can be incredibly challenging under normal circumstances. Achieving effective feedback with remote learning is even more complicated when the continuous feedback that we give to students throughout a lesson and the responsive teaching that is part and parcel of the dynamics of classroom teaching are no longer available to us.

Yet, the evidence from the EEF clearly shows the positive impact that feedback can have on student progress, so some time invested in exploring and testing possibilities can pay dividends.

What could feedback look like with remote learning?

1. Using email. Where possible, being available to students during lessons via email can provide one simple mechanism for providing feedback. It is particularly effective for providing responses to students’ questions.

2. Google Docs. This is what I have been using to provide my A Level students with feedback since schools closed and, on the whole, it has been successful. I am able to highlight and comment on specific areas of their work and I can clearly see where they have responded and acted on this feedback. This has prevented me being inundated with work in multiple formats and made the whole process more manageable. I wrote about blog about it here and my Research School colleague, Katie Wills, has also blogged about her use of Google Docs for feedback here.

3. Feedback could be provided using voice over technology, such as Showbie or SeeSaw. More information can be found on the links on page 3 here.

4. Use Loom for recorded whole class feedback and modelling. A brief guide to using Loom can be found here on page 3.

Thinking about how you are going to ensure that students understand, act upon and learn from the feedback is crucial. For example, students respond to my feedback during a Google Meet, so they still have the ability to ask questions and get clarification from me on the written feedback they have received.

Remember, that feedback doesn’t have to just be in the form of teacher feedback – peer feedback and self-assessment can be equally powerful.

Self-assessment, in particular, can be a very valuable tool during remote learning. Checklists, for example, can provide a useful way for students to reflect on their work independently and be responsible for fixing issues. Harry Fletcher-Wood writes about this convincingly here: https://improvingteaching.co.uk/2016/10/30/checklists-for-students-efficiency-autonomy-and-excellence-in-the-classroom/

Peer feedback, again, is certainly trickier remotely but Google Docs can be useful here too, enabling students to access each other’s work and provide comments which can be responded to. Katie Wills also discusses this in her previously mentioned blog.

My next step with providing feedback during remote learning is trialing the use of Microsoft Office Lens to enable students to hand write exam questions and provide me with a pdf to comment on rather than random, upside down photos in a variety of different sizes! I am hoping it will give me similar tools to Google Docs in terms of written comments and students ability to respond….. fingers crossed.