Giving More Useful Feedback to Students: an #eduread post

How to give better feedback is always a goal of mine. I sometimes (maybe frequently) find it hard to keep up with the pace of teaching, assessing, giving feedback, and reflecting on it. What about you?

Today I was reading a short article titled “How Am I Doing?” with some pointers for effective feedback. Five very useful ideas were presented; have a look at the article to see them all.

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The item that struck me the most was that students need a clear view of where they are heading with their learning and what their learning target is. Phrased in this way, it is a very simple idea and one I have been familiar with for years. However, I have found that at times students think their job in my classroom is to complete the activities I give them. They think that completion of activities is the success criteria. Instead I need to get across to them that their job in my class is to reach desired learning outcomes.

This relates to feedback in that there is no use giving feedback when students think they have successfully completed the task of “learning”. Feedback may seem like giving them more work to do, rather than helping them learn. But if students know their job is to achieve a learning goal. Feedback about progress towards learning goals helps students know how their efforts are leading to success.

In my classroom I am not the best (yet! growth mindset!) at giving indicators of where learning is heading and how we will get there. I was marking student work today and saw this comment (pictured above): “This is confusing because you have not explained what you are trying to do.” As it turns out, that is exactly what I need to hear myself! I appreciated this article as a reminder to expose the learning goals more frequently. And to provide personalised, specific feedback to students about how they are going towards meeting those goals.

#eduread is a group of mathematics teachers that read an article each week and discuss it on Twitter. Here is the blog that organises it. The chat is on Wednesday evenings in the US, which is Thursday morning for me. I can’t always participate in the Twitter chats but I can usually follow along later thanks to the hashtag. Would you like to join us?

Do you find it easy to give useful feedback to students?

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