Feedback that moves learning forward

Dylan Wiliam in his book talks about that the most effective feedback is just feedback that our students actually use in improving their own learning. To this end it is really important that you get to know your students to cater the feedback to the individual students. As well as getting to know your own students, teachers need to build trust with them. If students do not believe that their teachers know what they are talking about and have the students best interests at heart, they are unlikely to invest the effort needed to improve.

Build Your Students Capacity to Use Feedback

In their book Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well, Stone and Helen (2014) point out that there are three "triggers" that can affect how recipients of feedback react to the feedback: truth triggers, relationship triggers and identity triggers. Truth triggers are those related to the recipients perception of the accuracy of the feedback. For truth triggers the actual truth of the matter is irrelevant; it is the recipient's perception of the truth that matters. So if the student had actually been working on the assignment while watching a two-hour movie but the student's perception is that she spent two hours working on the assignment it will make it difficult for her to accept that she didn't put enough effort into the assignment. Relationship triggers are cued not by what the feedback is saying but who is saying it. One category of relationship triggers includes feedback that the recipient regards as hypocritical. Identity triggers are reactions not to the truth of the feedback, nor to the person providing the feedback, but rather to the recipients' view of themselves.

While these triggered responses get in the way of responding appropriately to feedback, it is important to note that they are entirely reasonable. The problem that these are not unreasonable responses to feedback but rather that they prevent our students from taking advantage of the available feedback to improve their capabilities. There is no simple way of getting students to like, value or even accept our feedback - it can be quite painful. But when teachers develop their relationships with their students - when students trust that teachers know what they are talking about and have the students' best interests at heart, and students see feedback as a way of increasing their capabilities - it is more likely that feedback leads to productive action.

Model Responding to Feedback

One way to take the ego out of the students' responses to your feedback is to give them practice in responding to feedback in a less emotionally charged context. For example you can write feedback on a piece of work by an anonymous student in another class, make one copy per group of students and give each group a copy of the work, together with criteria for the original task. You can then ask each group of students to improve the work by following your feedback. Although students are not improving their own work, they will learn alot from improving someone else's. You could differentiate this task by giving each group of students different pieces of work or even work with the same pieces but different feedback.

These are really important aspects of feedback and students that we need to take into consideration in planning our feedback processes in the classroom. It also leads to something that I believe is really important in the modern classroom which is a growth mindset and how important it is to develop it with our students. Ricci (2015) has some mind-blowing work in this area that I will discuss in a later post which allows students to take on the feedback that we give students.