If learners do nothing with your feedback what was the point?

This post will give you advice and tips covering two areas;

1. How to plan to enable feedback action
2. How to make action visible

Key to progress is action. Inaction is to stand still but what teachers want is progressive momentum from learners!

What we want is to get learners acting on their feedback and for this action to be viable.

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Planning for feedback action

This itself is in two parts;

• Planning your lessons/schemes to provide opportunity for feedback and action
• Planning how you give feedback to generate pupil action

Schemes and lesson planning for feedback and pupil action

Start with a clear vision of how often you will deliver content with the express purpose of assessing and giving feedback.

Ask yourself;

• How often is realistic?
• What kind of activity fits the learning outcomes?

Once you’ve chose the frequency of such assessed work (can I suggest every 3 weeks as a starting intention) you can begin to look at two things in tandem; what type of activity fits the learning outcomes and how can I give meaningful feedback on this which will generate pupil action?
Your planned activities should be planned round a simple cycle to be effective: Do, Review/Reflect/Feedback, Act!

1. Learners do the work
2. Teacher/Peer reviews/feeds back
3. Action is required

Simple three stage process, but to be successful you have to have planned for this, in schemes you need a clear time set aside for feedback activities (if Peers) and time to act on your feedback (often called DIRT) this must be planned for if you want it to be successful – otherwise you’ll find you try to squeeze activities in to schemes and have limited success.

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Feedback that requires action

This requires a simple rhetoric to be followed in order to be successful;

• Praise – the work that’s been done.
• Suggest – suggest areas to improve.
• Question – pose a question to stretch of challenge comprehension.
• Set – Set a clear expectation of action. For example: “Answer this question fully in next lesson”

Your feedback needs to follow that rhetoric every time in order to be successful in motivating learners to take action.

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Making progress visible

You’ve planned, handed out work, collected it in and followed the Praise, Suggest, Question, Set rhetoric for giving feedback now all you require is for learners to take that action…and for that action to be visible!

Make this easy by employing one or all of these methods;

• In lesson time have learners respond to work using a purple pen
• On worksheets ‘box’ off the area in which you expect learners to respond to their feedback
• Have ‘version 2’ of work printed on coloured paper
• Give sticky notes to learner to write repossess/reflections based on feedback on to
• Encourage running a coloured highlighter over corrections or responses to feedback
• Allow learners to ‘colour in’ their responses to feedback
• Allow learners to draw a box, cloud, circle or speech bubble around their responses to feedback
• Have a peer ‘tick’ off responses using a coloured pen

There are plenty more ways to make pupil responses to feedback jump out from the rest of their work but all of the above are ones you could try immediately in tomorrows lesson!

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Summary

The aim of this post was to highlight and make simple two things;

1. How to plan to enable feedback action
2. How to make action visible

Planning requires you to think and plan in advance when and how you’ll assess, and to employ a new and simple rhetoric to your feedback.

Making it visible requires a little creativity and clearly identified TIME in lessons in which you expect pupil action to be happen.

Hope this helps teachers out there who face the question ‘How are pupils responding to your feedback’ when it’s posed by Leaders and Ofsted.

Example gallery

coming soon…

Published by Paul

Teacher | Author | Lead Practitioner View all posts by Paul