There’s not enough time in the
What a delightful 6-word story to begin thinking about what it takes to give learners good feedback. Giving good feedback can be immensely beneficial to learners, but teachers have an understandable hesitation when revisiting feedback practices because of the conception that good feedback takes a lot of time.
This note summarizes what I learned from Macalester’s 2023 Spring Professional Activities workshop where Andrew Housiaux led the workshop Feedback in Small Shifts. Some of those ideas are addressed in this article.
Small shifts in our feedback practices can lead to less work for teachers and more learning for students.
Big picture summary
Feedback should cause thinking, should relate to learning goals that should have been shared with students, and should be more work for the recipient than the donor.
Indeed the whole purpose of feedback should be to increase the ownership that students feel of their own learning.
Teachers are often practiced at being thermometers—answering students’ “Where am I?” questions. But we have less practice at being thermostats—helping students answer “Where should I be?” and “How do I get there?”
Students must engage with feedback in order to learn from it
This principle seems insultingly obvious until we really dig into the engagement part. Engagement with feedback requires reflection and a desire to understand how one’s work could be improved. Engagement is NOT scanning for a point total or letter grade and then immediately closing, stowing, or trashing the assignment.
How do we design feedback that inspires thought? What can we do to design assignments and feedback so that students care about how to progress?
These questions are ones that need to present for the full span of a course because engaging thoughtfully with feedback is a lifelong endeavor that benefits intentional habit formation. We can help learners cultivate a habit of reading and thinking about feedback by baking response to feedback into the culture and values of our course.
One way to shape this culture is to make it a policy that certain assignments are returned in class with 15 minutes dedicated to responding to feedback.
Identity and relationships matter in feedback
Feedback is not a neutral interaction—the identity of the student and the teacher matter immensely.
- Some students come in to school with distrust of the school and their teachers
- ”Breaking the Cycle of Mistrust” by Yeager (article)
- Wise critique is a combination of high standards and belief in students’ capacity of growth
- ”I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and believe that you can succeed.”
- The Warm Demander has both high expectations and warm demeanor
- An interesting comment about warmth—this perhaps is not the right way to build trust. e.g., For a white educator, to some students it’s not possible to be the Warm Demander.
Give focused feedback on specific instructional goals
- Teachers need to be clear on the purpose of this assignment because otherwise we run the risk of giving feedback on everything. Then the students have a hard time
- 😂 meme about highlighting with the text “everything is important.” The whole picture is highlighted.
- Students could articulate what they want feedback on
- How do we give feedback that changes the learner vs. changes the assignment?
- Future-oriented feedback
- Anonymous grading
- Can reduce bias in telling them where they are (temperature)
- But there is also an argument to move away from this because the teacher knows that a student might be working on a specific, unique learning goal over the course of several assignments (e.g., clear thesis). Non-anonymous feedback is helpful in the rest of thermostat analogy—clarifying where they are heading and how they get there.
Teachers should separate feedback from grading
- Explicitly differentiate feedback and grading.
- Dramatize the difference: have student juggle a soccer ball. Then give them a grade “B”. Ask them “What did you learn from hearing ‘B’?”
- Two stars and a wish OR two stars and an arrow
- Two things done well
- One thing to improve on or look at more closely