I have been a Head of English for more than a decade at both maintained and independent schools. Leading the rollout of HPL at my current school, Ellesmere College, Shropshire, has been an interesting and rewarding challenge as it has given us a coherent pedagogical framework that explains much of what we knew, instinctively, works well in the classroom. It has also given us license to work with the students in a creative manner which, for many (if not all) of us was why we went into teaching in the first place.
As well as leading on HPL, I am also in charge of the Navy Section of the CCF and head of one of the College’s four academic and sporting competitive houses.
The purpose of the feedback does indeed matter. If students, often months after the work was attempted, look back and try to learn from what they did, having nothing to guide them can be a problem. As you mention though, there are different approaches which work for different people and having one-size-fits-all approaches can leave space for some to fall through the cracks.
Hi Fareeha,
I like the idea of students trying to explain which aspect of HPL they have demonstrated in their work. It's certainly a much more efficient use of your time than you writing it for them. I teach quite a few dyslexic students for whom writing can be quite a chore and for them, I often get them to explain verbally what they've done. That's harder to evidence but can, for the right student, be a quick and powerful tactic too.
Hi Faith,
For me, that instant feedback feels like the best way of affecting change but, as has been discussed elsewhere in this thread, there is a benefit to more detailed, written teacher comments which can really help students to revise many months after the work was done.
Hi Hesekiel,
That’s a brilliant and, I think, very challenging question. Instinctively, I think that part of that challenge lies in the nature of what makes a subject ‘unpopular’. If that is because students associate it with too high a level of difficulty, then I imagine that feedback needs to be more focussed on rewarding successes to create some positivity, not necessarily making things easy, just rewarding endeavour until the students are of a more receptive mindset.
Reading ‘Why Don’t Students Like School’ by Daniel Willingham makes some interesting points that do link to this.
Foreign languages need a special approach to feedback - you are completely right. Pupils need to have their successes celebrated and their targets need to be very easily understandable and achievable. We've been working with using Google rubrics to help with this so that the feedback builds on the task and then provides short, easily-achievable tasks for pupils to work on depending on their score for a particular element. It provides extra practice that they need, but in a way that feels accessible.
Hope this gives you some ideas.
All the best,
Deanne
Hello Deanne,
Thank you for this inspiring idea. Could you share more thoughts on the Google rubrics?
How does it work?
Regards
Absolutely. How familiar are you with Google Classroom/assignments?
Great! I am not familiar with Google Classroom. We use Microsoft Teams instead.
I am also willing to learn Google Classroom if Teams cannot do the job.
Regards
That's fine. In fact, the rubrics work perfectly well without Google!
The basic idea is that you first decide on your criteria. So, say you would like to mark a piece of short written work for content, grammar, accuracy and a specific tense (maybe a past tense), you could decide to give a mark out of 3 for each criterion. Equally, you could use a qualification/exam board mark scheme to allocate the scores. - this bit really depends on your own specific requirements.
Then you mark the piece of work according to the criteria. I often use a highlighter to highlight errors and tick accurate/impressive work. rather than correcting the work for the pupils. Once you have allocated a score for each criteria, the pupils then refer to the rubrics. You can make and use these in Google Classroom or you can just as easily provide them as a feedback sheet or just have them on the board. The important thing is that you can give the pupils practice on all four areas depending on their score. Thus the feedback is personalised, but also relatively easy to follow.
To give an example, if a pupil scores full marks for using a past tense, you might have a task which gives them some irregular forms to use in a sentence, but if they only scored half marks, you might give them a task to find and explain the rules that make the tense, or direct them to a video to watch. - it's entirely your choice. A nice way to do this is to use QR codes so that the pupils are following a link to some extra work.
What's important for you is that you have a measure of how well they have done on different aspects and what's important for them is that they have an accessible follow-up task that supports their learning, but doesn't necessarily just direct them back to their original work asking them to correct something they weren't sure about originally.
Obviously, once they've completed their follow-up work, they can have a go at correcting their work, but by then they will have completed and achieved something else.
This method of feedback moves the focus of the work from the teacher to the pupil and helps them to see that there are different ways of moving forward once they've completed a piece of work without simply stewing over it - especially if they're not very pleased with or proud of it. It shows them that learning moves forward, but also links back to the piece they've just done and including a range of tasks in the feedback, like videos to watch or podcasts to listen to means that it feels a little bit different.
I tend to base a lesson around these activities and ask the pupils to write up a little about what they learned/found out/practised in order to consolidate the learning process and asking them how the activities used aspects of HPL then makes them more aware of how their learning is being activated as part of their response to their score.
Hope you find this as useful as I do!
We will hopefully have a Languages community up and running soon, so please watch this space as I'm hoping we can all share lots of useful ideas!
Thank you, Deanne, for this valuable contribution.
I am looking forward to that space.
regards
I think that feedback is an essential aspect of learning as it gives all stakeholders an idea of the progress made by the learner, and helps learners in consolidating their experience. Written feedback is more effective when learners are given thinking time for reflections and pen down their thought for future reference/review.
A systemised written feedback engenders clarity of expected reflections; it gives students ownership of their learning and a sense of positive accomplishment.
When writing feedback to parents, written feedback usually have these three components: A point to praise, A point to raise and next steps.
When giving written feedback to students, we consider: 'What went well (WWW)' and ‘Even better if (EBI)’.
EBI could be tied to an idea that keeps the learner thinking forward. e.g. consulting secondary resources to solve a question etc.
One way to measure the effectiveness of written feedback is when learners understand and act to fill the gaps identified in their learning through the directed reflections.
However, oral feedback is quick and formative since it is meant to address real-time concerns of a learner, challenge intellectual curiosity, promote intellectual playfulness etc, which are parts of the ingredients for higher order thinking skills.The WWW and EBI sound like eminently sensible ways of systematising feedback. Out of interest, in chemistry, do you have a lot of questions that lead to relatively brief, concise answers? I ask, because often in English we are asking one essay-style question which requires an extended response. Writing feedback at the end of the essay can often be a page or two away from the place in the essay where there's room for improvement, yet to write the feedback where it is required, i.e. earlier in the piece, can lead students to just focus on that section to the exclusion of the rest of it. Where is most of your feedback recorded?
Hi David, it's interesting how different subjects have different requirements from feedback. I can recall my chemistry lessons from decades ago and can still picture my teacher's comments that pointed out where I'd gone wrong. I don't know how much impact that had at the time, but I do remember that when it came to revising, it was easiest when looking back through my books that showed me the correct answers (if I'd tried to revise from my own clumsy attempts to answer questions, I would have failed miserably!).
Hi Fiona,
I completely agree that verbal feedback is powerful and, personally speaking, I find it far more impactful than written. Also, I think it's a shame that we teach in an environment/time where leaving an evidence trail is something we have to consider, let alone spend time on; proving things that happen have actually happened is not a useful process for the teacher or the student, but, reluctantly, I can see why others might want to see some proof. I guess that looking at a student's work and talking to them ought to be evidence enough, but again, that seems to not be enough at times. Ideally, a short video of the student explaining what had been discussed would be powerful but a bit hard to manage...
Hi Fiona,
Remarkably interesting question indeed. I would like to add to the question: how would the students respond to the feedback?
I am truly interested in this.
regards
It is like Pandora's Box! The more you look for best models and try and capture the impact of such feedback, the more and more ideas and tweaks I discover! Where I want to get to is to help students to give relevant, impactful verbal feedback to others - I think this is where improved student performance can really be positively supported.
F
I think you’re entirely right. Different forms of feedback have different virtues and as such ought to be used as context requires. One-size fits all feedback policies make for a systematised approach but can end up limiting the impact that different types of feedback can achieve. Not having a system can feel liberating yet also allow poor practice to creep in.
I think that any feedback that allows learners to find a useful avenue to make progress is the key to things. You mention zonal marking which I've found to be helpful as it doesn't overload a student with a whole essay's worth of feedback and can lead to really focussed improvements in their work.
Hi Simon,
I always find interesting when students prefer feedback from each other rather than me (though that probably says quite a lot about me!). Often I find they can be quite severe judges and find they need reminding to highlight positives.
You’re quite right about the need for them to crystallise the learning objectives through discussion. Talking about their learning helps them, over time, to internalise what they’re trying to achieve. For A-Level literature students, it can take months and months of discussion before they start to grasp what each assessment objective really means. Without that dialogue, I doubt they would get there.
Time for students to act on feedback is necessary, they need processing time and time to develop perseverance and resilience. If we rush them onto the next task, we fail to give them the space to self-regulate.
Hi Naila,
The last point you make about students needing the time and space to self-regulate is so important and also, frequently, so hard to achieve when it feels like there is so much 'content' to cover. Making that space bears fruit in the long run as students develop the resilience and confidence to tackle things more speedily.
We certainly need to adapt our approach to feedback depending on the needs of our students without lowering our expectations and standards. I try to sit down with a student during review time and give constructive verbal feedback and gradually introduce different marking symbols to help the student understand the written feedback in the future. e.g. the symbols used for spelling mistakes and basic punctuation marks.
Hi Nadia,
It must be so daunting trying to learn English when it’s unfamiliar. What you mention about trying to find the time to sit down and talk with them seems so important a way of building rapport.
Hi Daniel and everyone who has posted on the forum
I tried looking for a Physical Education forum, but unfortunately, we don't have one..... yet:-) Decided to trespass on the English link instead. The question about feedback drew me in. I hope you don't mind.
I have had the pleasure of reading through your thoughts, ideas and opinions..... all very insightful, thank you. However, as a PE teacher, and through playing sports myself, I know that feedback doesn't always have to come from an external/written source. As practitioners, we often rely on our ability or skill set to extract the learning from our students (through written/verbal feedback) as appose to teaching the process that will allow our students to give themselves self-reflective feedback. I think context is important here, as in Physical Education the notion of teaching skill acquisition lends itself to self-reflective feedback, but I'm sure it can be manipulated and used to good effect in a multitude of different contexts/subjects.
For example, let's assume a student is being taught how to strike a ball with a bat. Based on the outcome of their strike, they can provide themselves with a vast amount of information. Did I make contact with the ball? Was the contact, good contact? How do I know if it was good contact? What was the outcome of the strike? How far/fast did the ball travel.? What position did I get my body in to make the contact? etc.?
Understanding the concept of consequence feedback takes time, as I would regard it as a higher-order skill, but I do feel that HPL has accelerated that process for my students, Ultimately, teaching students the importance of self-reflective feedback, and how to apply it to their learning can be a very powerful yet passive way to develop high-performance learners. I know that I have seen a vast improvement in my student's ability to understand and then interpret the information they have been given. As a result, they are making better progress in their learning.
Thanks
Kam
I think you're right to focus on how much self-awareness many students do have about how well they have achieved a particular goal. I guess that knowing the success criteria before hand is the crucial part. If they do, then they are equipped to measure their own performance and, more often that not, learn from their mistakes.
P.S. Glad that PE is adding to the English discussion!