Skip to main content

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 students in being more proactive regarding feedback in the future.

Strategies

  • Feedback Requests: I ask students to look over the rubric and pick one, specific criteria around which to seek feedback. When they submit work for formative feedback, I can answer their question more quickly than if I were reviewing the entire sample. Even better, students are more receptive to my direction because they asked for it!
  • Digital Office Hours: I find that it's hard to get many of my students to attend office hours because that limited time rarely falls when they're ready to work. By offering digital office hours with Floop, I can be available to students asynchronously when they are ready to work. Students can submit work, I give them feedback when I have time, and then they're more likely to revise because the feedback comes when they're prepared to work on it. 

  • Feedback Dialogues: Many feedback systems (both high- and low-tech) treat feedback as simply a transmission of information from teacher to student. To be effective, feedback should be a conversation. I like to respond to my students work with questions and then give them dedicated time (DIRT) in class to respond. This lets students engage authentically with feedback before they're expected to apply it to revision or future feedback. 

Building a Holistic Feedback System

These strategies meet the following criteria

Actionable Information

☐ Focuses feedback on task, process, or regulation
☐ Supports timely communication of feedback information
☐ Structures feedback to include information about goals, progress, and activities for improvement
☐ Aligns feedback with standards and criteria
☐ Supports a variety of assessment and feedback types

Feedback Literacy

☐ Supports guided self-assessment
☐ Supports guided peer-assessment
☐ Supports worked examples
☐ Supports engagement with grading criteria
✓ Asks students to specify the feedback they would like to receive
☐ Encourages students to thoroughly read feedback information
☐ Encourages students to revisit prior feedback information
☐ Emphasizes the connection of one assignment to the broader learning outcomes
☐ Supports a positive relationship between feedback provider and recipient

Agency to Act

☐ Makes evident when feedback information has been used to improve work
✓ Promotes dialogue and discussion around feedback information
☐ Supports sequencing of tasks to promote application of feedback
☐ Supports sharing of tailored resources or alignment of resources with learning needs
☐ Supports goal-setting and reflection in response to feedback
☐ Supports development and execution of an improvement or revision plan
☐ Supports revision and resubmitting of work
☐ Supports the organization of feedback to reveal patterns and themes
☐ Supports the showcasing of work that evidences growth in response to feedback
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back-to-School: Consider Your Feedback System, Not Grading System

One question I ask other teachers is “How important is feedback in learning?” Every teacher I talk to agrees that feedback is crucial. It’s how both teacher and student gets better. Research backs the importance of feedback; building off of John Hattie’s work comparing factors on learning, Evidence for Learning’s toolkit ranks feedback as having the highest impact out of their 34 approaches (along with meta-cognition) with a +8 months’ impact on students’ learning progress. I follow the feedback question with “How important are grades in learning?” It might seem like a loaded question. You can imagine how teachers respond: “They’re not.” Why give grades, then? We’ll save that topic for another occasion. For now, I just want to point out that we are frequently asked to consider and describe our grading system by students, parents, colleagues, and administrators. We’re rarely asked about the much bigger and more important component of our work: feedback. With back-to-school qu
4 comments
Read more

A Culture of Iteration: Policies and Practices for a Revision-FocusedClassroom

Success in the real world depends on a person's ability to iterate. to understand the definition of success on a task to seek feedback early and often to use that feedback to revise and refine until successful As teachers, its our job to scaffold this process, with developmentally-appropriate differentiation, until our students can fly solo. As I sit here writing this, my  SO  Dan is at his desk  red-lining  a building diagram for a warehouse in Canada. When he's done, the diagram will go back to his team of engineers where they will respond to Dan's feedback with a better design. They'll repeat this process until both building code and client requirements have been met. To do this work, which requires an iteration cycle that can last over a year or more, Dan has to understand building code and client needs, seek feedback from other engineers and the client, and use that feedback to revise and refine until the design is ready for implementation. ​Dan wasn'
4 comments
Read more

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?"
Post a Comment
Read more