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Floop Team & Dr. Naomi Winstone: What does the research say about feedback best practices?

Over winter break, Floop co-founder Melanie and I had the privilege of talking with prominent feedback researcher Dr. Naomi Winstone. Her research has discovered that feedback interventions all seem to target at least one of four metacognitive skills, described by the SAGE process, and hypothesizes that a holistic approach to developing feedback systems should target all four of the skills: Self-Appraisal: judging one's abilitiesAssessment Literacy: understanding the grading process, standards, and criteriaGoal-Setting & Self-Reflection: being goal-oriented and monitoring progress to meet outcomesEngagement & Motivation: having an attitude of receptiveness to performance information Essentially, for feedback to reach that level of effectiveness that we've heard from experts like Hattie & Timperly, students need to be motivated to engage with feedback and have the feedback literacy skills to use it, and the instructional environment must give them the agency to act …
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Part 3 - Tools for an Equitable Feedback System: Actively Seeking Feedback

This series of posts will cover a variety of bite-sized strategies that can be incorporated into a more holistic feedback system. To learn more about the research behind these approaches, we recommend you first read our white paper.

Part 1 - Feedback is Emotional
Part 2 - Engaging with Criteria



Winstone, Nash, Parker, & Rowntree (2017) argue that proactive recipience is necessary for students to fully benefit from feedback information. Proactive recipience is "a state or activity of engaging actively with feedback processes, thus emphasizing the fundamental contribution and responsibility of the learner.” The information communicated in formative feedback is just part of the equation; it won't have significant impacts on student learning unless students also develop feedback literacy and the agency to act on feedback.

Creating systems that encourage student to actively seek out feedback, and planning activities that teach the skills of seeking feedback, will support student…
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Part 2 - Tools for an Equitable Feedback System: Engaging with Criteria

This series of posts will cover a variety of bite-sized strategies that can be incorporated into a more holistic feedback system. To learn more about the research behind these approaches, we recommend you first read our white paper.

Part 1 - Feedback is Emotional



For feedback information to be useful, it must communicate:  Where am I going? (What are the goals?)How am I going? (What progress is being made toward the goal?)Where to next? (What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?) (Hattie & Timperley, 2007).  Supporting students in engaging with the grading criteria helps give context to the feedback to come. In other words, it does the groundwork of helping them determine for themselves, "Where am I going?" StrategiesTranslating the Rubric: Even when we write our rubrics in student-friendly language we can't assume that they understand the intent of the criteria or what it will look like in application. I spend about ten minutes whenever I introduc…
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Part 1 - Tools for an Equitable Feedback System: Feedback is Emotional

This series of posts will cover a variety of bite-sized strategies that can be incorporated into a more holistic feedback system. To learn more about the research behind these approaches, we recommend you first read our white paper.

Most of us have experienced that moment where you pass back papers, full of rich and detailed feedback, and watch a student walk out of class and drop it in the recycling. It's hard not to take it personally. Why do some of our students struggle so much with receiving and using feedback?

Receiving feedback can make students anxious and that can lead to feedback avoidance. The way that feedback messages are perceived can differ greatly depending on the relationship between the provider and the recipient. Feedback comments that are perceived as negative feedback by one student may be received as positive feedback by another. We can help our students be more receptive to feedback by helping them to uncover and unpack their emotional responses.

StrategiesP…
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Peer Feedback on Student Presentations: Use Roles for Better Feedback and Engagement

When students provide feedback to each other on presentations, do you wonder:
How do I help students give each other meaningful feedback?How do I keep all students engaged during presentations and presentation feedback? One solution to both of these challenges is assigning feedback roles.
Roles during practice presentations For team presentations, I have students practice and give feedback with another team. For the team presenting, all team members stand and present as if it were the real thing. For the team giving feedback, each person focuses on a different aspect of presentation feedback. Here are roles I've used for 3-4 people teams:
Content - Provide feedback on the content of the presentationPresentation Skills - Observe and provide feedback on presentation skills and slide designTimer - Write down the times for each part of the presentation (or video tape it!) If you provide each role feedback guidelines, like a checklist, questions, or rubric, it can help students give each…
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Writing Strong Criteria for Peer Review

A great peer review assignment is open-ended. A closed-ended question is a closed door. Open-ended assignments are an invitation to think critically and creatively about a topic. There is a time and place in instruction and assessment for closed-ended questions – we need to know what our students can recall and understand before we know they’re ready to move on to higher-order tasks. But the great assignments, the one’s we share with our colleagues and the ones that grow our students confidence, are open-ended.
A great criteria is singular, challenging, and a bit subjective. As teachers, we are subject area experts. One of our tasks is to help our students become experts themselves. This means that we must clearly define for them what excellent work looks like. We do this with our assignment criteria. By distilling our assignments down to smaller, bite-sized tasks, we can bring the focus in on one, single criteria. Our instruction and feedback, then, can elevate student work and allo…
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5-Minute Energizers to Activate You and Your Students

We're officially in the grind. I ask my teacher colleagues how they're doing, and the standard response is a sigh: "I'm really looking forward to catching up on grading over the 3-day weekend," "I'm counting down the days until Thanksgiving," "I have 20 letters of recommendation to write."
If we're feeling this way, our students are too! Here are super quick activities to inject energy back into your classroom: Snap, Stomp, Clap (Partners) Each person counts off to 3, i.e. Person A: "1", Person B: "2", Person A: "3", Person B: "1", etc. When everyone gets the hang of it, try it again, but replace 1's with a snap of the fingers (snap, 2, 3, snap, 2, 3, etc.) Do it again, but also replace 3's with a stomp (snap, 2, stomp, snap, 2, stomp, etc.) Do it again, but also replace 2's with a clap (snap, clap, stomp, snap, clap, stomp, etc.) Gift Giving Game (Partners) Person A pantomimes givin…
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