Research School Network: Building precision and impact into teacher’s verbal feedback Lisa Lockley, ELE, discusses effective feedback

Timely and actionable feedback is crucial so that students can improve their learning. Over the last year we have used EEF’s research indicating that verbal feedback shows ​‘slightly higher impacts overall (+7 months)’ in comparison to written or digital feedback- clearly it also has positive implications in terms of teacher workload for any school setting.


With this in mind it has become increasingly important for us to develop a collective understanding of verbal feedback; intentional monitoring and lesson preparation as a holistic approach to student learning over the past year so that students feel supported in their areas of weakness, identification and explanation of misconceptions and in them having increased motivation to improve.

Together with teachers’ having their physical planned routes around the classroom to ​‘monitor with intent’, implementing verbal feedback successfully requires:


Communication relating to feedback policies
Assessing pupil understanding
Ensuring feedback can be acted upon
Providing students the opportunity to act upon their feedback

As well as the EEF’s guidance to ensure that feedback redirects and refocuses the learners’ action to achieve a goal it has been important to consider the Implementation Guidance so that there continues to be conscientiousness in developing staff understanding, student response and sustainability. Verbal feedback can not stand alone, it is part of wider training processes keenly focused on teachers considering the foundations for the feedback they provide– highlighting the importance of delivering high-quality instruction, which includes making purposeful use of formative assessment strategies, such as aiming feedback towards learning intentions and using feedback to fill learning gaps.

Training as part of the implementation process of purposeful verbal feedback may well draw on evidence informed practice around lesson preparation and the curriculum so that monitoring is intentional, and colleagues can give verbal feedback which is both precise and reduces their own cognitive load, as indicated in the image below:

Feedback should focus on moving learning forward, targeting the specific learning gaps that pupils exhibit. Specifically, high quality feedback may focus on the task, subject, and self-regulation strategies.
Feedback that focuses on a learner’s personal characteristics, or feedback that offers only general and vague remarks, is less likely to be effective.

The underlying principles of feedback discussed here are ultimately a greater lever that whatever guise the feedback appears in. What remains undeniable is that it cannot be effective as an isolated component; it must be rooted in the firm foundations of effective instruction and embedded classroom routines.

References and further reading


Lemov, D ​‘Teach Like A Champion 3.0’ Wiley, 2021


EEF:
Feedback | EEF (educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk)


EEF_Feedback_Recommendations_Poster.pdf (d2tic4wvo1iusb.cloudfront.net)