05. The Power of Feedback by Sandy Clarke

05.

The Power of Feedback

MRS SANDY CLARKE (TEACHER OF CHEMISTRY)

CONSIDERS THE ROLE THAT FEEDBACK PLAYS IN HER TEACHING AND ITS VITAL IMPORTANCE, OFFERING PRACTICAL TIPS TO TRY OUT IN THE CLASSROOM.

Being a classroom teacher is no mean feat; we are constantly juggling with so much, and it is not surprising that the effectiveness of feedback can be overlooked. As a school, we have been spending a lot of time looking at effective feedback, and I have witnessed so many of my colleagues do such a great job with this. However, I think that work can still be done on ensuring that the feedback is taken on board; after all, we have all put in so much effort into our marking as well as other forms of feedback, and we would certainly want out students to benefit from the feedback. Hattie and Gan (2011) wrote that “we know much about the power of feedback, but too little about how to harness this power and make it work more effectively in the classroom”, which to some extent, I agree.

STUDENTS RESPONDING TO TEACHERS’ FEEDBACK

Realistically, how many of us have an excess amount of time to investigate whether our students are learning from the feedback, and are

THERE IS A POSITIVE CORRELATION BETWEEN GOOD QUALITY FEEDBACK AND BOTH ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT AND MOTIVATION.

subsequently making progress? I think that despite our best efforts, sometimes we just hope for the best (we hope that we have equipped the students with the right skills to make use of the feedback appropriately). In addition, depending on the feedback, it is not always measurable. I find that at the start of the academic year especially when taking a new class, spending time to establish a routine, such as at the start of the lessons when students are entering the classroom, it is worth asking students to read and respond to prep feedback, and make sure we check that they have made corrections. It might take a few weeks to establish this routine, and we might be losing 5–10 minutes per lesson for those few weeks, but soon they will have a habit of responding to the feedback. If students know that we check and re-check their work, they tend to feel obliged to do the task (it is particularly easy now with One Note, as they will not misplace a piece of work and forget about it). After a few weeks, you will find that students automatically respond to feedback. The magical thing is that I am now noticing many students automatically respond to feedback in their own time and I don’t need to allocate lesson time for the task. Hopefully, this is a skill or a culture that we can instil in them. It is a great feeling that they are willing to spend time to work on your feedback even when you don’t ask them to!

For me, the second challenge is also what to do with the corrections afterwards. It might need adapting for some subjects, but I strongly believe that it is essential for them to learn from the corrections, and I ask students to add corrections to their revision notes, so when they revise, they can incorporate the corrections into their revision.

TEACHERS RESPONDING TO STUDENTS’ FEEDBACK

In my opinion, feedback should be a two-way communication. How do we know whether our initial feedback is working? How do we know if students are making progress? We do this all the time, we assess them verbally and on paper. Post COVID restrictions, now that we are back in the classroom, we have a larger variety of ways to gain feedback from the students. Recently, I have been doing revision classes with the exam groups, and they are so tired of doing yet more and more past papers. Whilst past papers are key to improve on application skills in a subject like Chemistry, just to give them a slight ‘break’ and a variety, I have used ‘loop game’ which works in a similar way to Dominoes.

Students seem to love this activity as it provides immediate feedback for them, and also for me to know whether they have learnt from the feedback, or if there are specific gaps in their knowledge. Of course, we need to design the ‘loop game’ or in fact any activity (such as an effective low-tech weekly quiz on paper), to make sure it gives effective feedback to the students and for us, not just a bit of fun! Like many colleagues, I also try to use different online games and platform such as Kahoot, Blookat, and UpLearn. They key is to utilise something that will give us feedback on whether our students are improving as a consequent of our feedback.

Koenka et aI. (2021) found in their study that there is a positive correlation between good quality feedback and both academic achievement and motivation. I also believe that effective feedback (mutual) is not only important for students making progress, but also for us to build a closer rapport with them. A few students have told me that they like that we care about following up on actions from the feedback, they feel like we care about their learning. In a Parents’ Meeting, a couple of parents have commented that they very much appreciate that when AfDs are followed up on. So, all this following up on feedback is time consuming, but once we have set up expectations and a routine, it will pay dividends.