Research School Network: We’re talking about ​‘Feedback’ Implementing the EEF guidance – step by step.

Based on my own experiences both as teacher and leader over the last 24 years in education, I believe that feedback is one of the most powerful tools in a teacher’s arsenal.

When I first started teaching, I simply didn’t use it right. My cycle was:

- I taught something ​‘adequately’
- By outcome, I differentiated my marking
- Students improved their work as far as their motivation would take them

No one had taught me any differently.

It was several years later that I started to embrace quality feedback and what this could mean to student learning and outcomes. The drive on DIRT (Dedicated Improvement & Reflection Time) and the ​‘Power of the Purple Pen’ movement made a fundamental difference to my teacher habits.

The EEF toolkit suggests that feedback may have ​‘very high’ impact for very low cost: this is certainly my experience across a range of schools.

The six recommendations from the EEF are below. 

These recommendations are highly logical, but I have seen feedback done very ineffectively and I believe this is down to not laying effective foundations. Taking each of the recommendations in turn, I would like to consider (in this first of six blogs) – what is actually meant by ​‘Lay the foundations for effective feedback’?

Firstly: the teacher. Dylan William was significant in my own development with his work on the positive and negative effects of feedback, but some of this work seems to have been ​‘obscured’ against a backdrop of workforce reform and people up and down the country swinging from ​‘no impact marking’ to ​‘no marking or feedback at all’!

William speaks of the impact of grades and comments and how we should or shouldn’t use these aspects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Vb8xGjuyE4

Watching a short clip like this, followed by discussion can really help staff’s mindset in relation to how they do or don’t give feedback.

In terms of laying strong foundations for quality feedback, teachers need to understand the cycle of feedback which looks something like this:

For the teacher part of this partnership, I would argue that the most important part which requires significant thought is defining the success criteria. If this is well defined, it will shape lesson planning, pedagogy and responsive feedback ensuring there is real clarity, weight and rigour, ultimately leading to stronger impact.

As mentioned, students too need to understand the cycle of feedback AND their role in it.

The student part of this partnership, in terms of laying the foundations, is the habit they need to build in order to pursue their best work. Yes, they need to understand the cycle of feedback, but they also need to be part of a classroom culture where feedback is really valued. The teacher needs to model this in their own work. Practices like live modelling and class feedback (be kind, be specific, be helpful) to improve the teacher’s work is a significant way to help build this culture where feedback is a prized thing which everyone in the classroom is thankful for.

The importance of this first recommendation cannot be stressed enough if we want stakeholders to really understand and value the journey of improving the impact of feedback.

This blog was written by Stacey Jordan, Operational Research Lead at Staffordshire Research School. 

To read more about this subject visit: 

https://educationendowmentfoun…

https://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/Def…