Dr Jonathan Doherty, Leeds Trinity University

The pandemic has significantly changed how and where learning takes place. For the first time in history, teachers are tasked with providing education remotely, beyond the school. Not without its challenges, this does provide an opportunity to rethink the core principles of teaching and learning and at the same time promote high standards of achievement. 

Technology can help excite, engage and empower more able learners. It opens new channels of communication. It is a chance for learners to own and shape their own learning and it creates opportunities for tailored learning. In his podcast, Assessment and feedback in an online context (February, 2020), Jamie Scott suggested that the principles of good feedback and assessment apply to the online environment; they just need to be reframed to fit a new context. This blog post discusses one important aspect of teaching and learning – feedback – and provides some strategies to promote this in the context of remote teaching.

The power of effective feedback

Hundreds of articles have been written about feedback and its role in knowledge and skill enhancement and on motivation to learn. When effective feedback is combined with effective teaching, it can be very powerful in facilitating learning. John Hattie (2007) placed it in the top 10 influences on pupil achievement. So what is it and why is it such a powerful facilitator of learning? Feedback is “the process in which learners make sense of information about their performance and use it to enhance the quality of their work or learning strategies" (Henderson et al., 2018, p. 16). This definition of feedback goes beyond just providing comments about pupils’ work. It describes the process of using information resulting from a task to make improvement. Feedback can come from different sources: beginner learners require much scaffolding, while prompts to do with self-regulation are appropriate for more able pupils.

Task prompts include:

• Does the answer meet the success criteria?
• Can he/she elaborate on the answer given?
• Is there other information that could be included to meet the criteria?

Process prompts include:

• What strategies were used and why?
• What does this tell me about his/her understanding of key concepts and knowledge?

Self-regulation prompts include:

• How can he/she monitor this work?
• How can he/she reflect on his/her own learning?
• What learning goals has the pupil achieved?
• Can you teach another pupil to…?

Decades of education research support the idea that greater learning comes from teaching less and providing more feedback. In remote teaching, there are reduced opportunities to pick up on pupils’ non-verbal cues such as nods, frowns and expressions of elation from new understandings normally seen in a classroom. Whilst these might be interpreted as important cues, they are not the most reliable sources of feedback and are in effect poor proxies for learning. In remote teaching and learning, it is more difficult to get such feedback, which means we need to be much clearer on the purpose of the activity, its assessment and the ways in which feedback is given.  

Effective feedback, given remotely or face-to-face, reduces the “gap” in learning – that is the space between current and desired understanding. Feedback is most powerful when it helps learners negotiate the gap between where they are and where they need to be. It should address three fundamental questions:

Where am I going? Pupils must understand their goals and what success at those goals looks like. Goals relate to feedback by informing learners on what is needed (success criteria) so they can direct and evaluate their actions. It allows them to set reasonable goals ahead. 

How am I doing? This entails feedback about past, present or how to progress from the starting point to the next or endpoint. It is information about progress, about personal performance and attitude to learning. It offers information about what is and what is not understood and allows learners to track their performance. 

Where to next? This feedback helps learners in choosing the next appropriate challenges, to achieve self-regulation, the strategies to work on for greater fluency and ultimately deeper understanding. Feedback allows pupils and teachers to set further appropriately challenging goals for ongoing learning.

Effective feedback is NOT… supplying only a mark for a piece of work or giving a generalised comment. “This is a poor piece of writing” is a value judgement and not good feedback. Similarly, “You might want to use more paragraphs”, is advice and not helpful feedback either.

10 essentials of effective feedback 

1. Feedback resides in what is received and interpreted by a student, rather than what a teacher believes has taken place.
2. Feedback is only successful if pupils use it to improve their performance.
3. Feedback is more effective when the criteria for success are known in advance and where the goal to achieve success is shared by pupil(s) and teacher.
4. The purpose(s) of the feedback should be made clear and be specific.
5. It should be timely and given as soon as possible. 
6. It must assure learners that meeting cognitive challenge is part of learning.
7. It should be elaborative, i.e. telling the learner something about their work that they were not able to see for themselves.
8. It works best in a positive, affirming climate (including online classrooms).
9. It should help to teach more able learners to answer their own questions and develop self-regulation skills.
10. Feedback must challenge pupils to invest effort in moving forwards.

Conclusion

Effective feedback is one of the powerful enablers of learning. Consistently asking “Where am I going? How am I doing? Where to next?” embeds this in deep learning and aligns with classroom assessment. It is not an isolated nor time-consuming process. 

References

• Hattie, J.& Timperley, H. (2007) The Power of Feedback. Review of Educational Research. Vol. 77, No. 1, pp. 81–112 
• Henderson, M., Boud, D., Molloy, E., Dawson, P., Phillips, M., Ryan, T., & Mahoney, P. (2018). Feedback for learning: closing the assessment loop. Australian Government Department of Education and Training.
• Scott. J. (2020) Assessment and feedback in an online context. Evidence-based Education. Podcast 24th February. Accessed 14 February 2021.
  

Additional reading and support:

• Remote teaching and learning collection
• Lunch & Learn: feedback for learning for the more able