Teacher to student feedback

The frequency of feedback in classrooms is low (Hattie & Timperley) and if we focus on providing students with improved, quality feedback in individual classrooms, departments and schools we will “have an almost immediate positive effect” (Dinham).

Dylan Wiliam shows us that, “Giving students marks is no better than giving no feedback at all. Giving comments, on the other hand, produces substantial improvements in learning. However, what is surprising is that giving both marks and comments together produces no improvement.”

Wiliam also points out that, “Teachers who spend time crafting helpful comments are wasting their time if they also give a mark. The teachers would be better off just giving marks. The students won’t learn anything, but it saves time. A teacher will typically spend more time marking a student’s work than the student will spend on following up the comment. This is crazy.”

Wiliam advocates comment-only marking or feedback that engages students by asking them to think. For instance, instead of telling students that they got 15 out of 20 in Maths, the teacher could tell a student that five of their answers were wrong, and that they should find them and fix them. Rather than correcting spelling, punctuation and grammar, English teachers could put a letter in the margin for each error in that line using a G for an error in grammar, an S for a spelling mistake, a P for a punctuation.

Interestingly, Wiliam also points out that while students need some feedback about how they are doing in terms of marks or grades, he suggests this should be no more than once every two or three years in primary schools, once a year in lower secondary , and once a term when before school-leaving exams.

So my challenges this year are to:
1. Focus on improving the quality and quantity of feedback.
2. Give written or verbal feedback one week before giving the mark.
3. Provide feedback that requires students to think.
4. Reduce the amount of marks and grades.

12 thoughts on “Teacher to student feedback

  1. Excellent blog post.
    Of all points I haven’t yet done 3 – challenging students too think. It might be a bit tricky as some might not know exactly how to remedy the mistake (that is why they made it in the first place).
    I will try it though.

  2. Hi!

    Great post. I want to add to Cristina comment. What I personnaly do is that I send my students back with their wrong answers and ask them to find what they did wrong. They can review their notes, ask another kid for help or anything to correct their mistakes. The mots important point is to get them to explain what they learned after they get back with the good answer

  3. Hi!

    Great post. I want to add to Cristina comment. What I personnaly do is that I send my students back with their wrong answers and ask them to find what they did wrong. They can review their notes, ask another kid for help or anything to correct their mistakes. The most important point is to get them to explain what they learned after they get back with the good answer.

    Cameron, can you tell me where to find the 3 references you mentioned un your post?

    François

  4. We work with students who struggle with basic reading and writing tasks. Many have previously experienced a great deal of failure, therfore they lack confidence and appreciate immediate feedback. As we monitor their progress, our goal is also to provide constructive comments as quickly as possible.

  5. I have been having students in my Communications classes revise work (with feedback!) until it is Fully Meeting expectations before I accept it. Students may get 10 to 20+ interactions on a single paragraph. This eliminates the instinct in the reluctant learner to “just get the pass” on each assignment and stop moving forward in their learning. The thoughtful use of “I” (in progress) when students miss key assignments replaces the use of the zero. I believe I am getting much more out of them and more learning transfers to the 40% Ministry exam. I’m not going back to traditional style assessment. Great blog, Cameron! PJ

  6. Wonderful post – I am going to piggy-back off your idea of feedback in three ways
    1. Focus a challenge of feedback with my dept heads
    2. Model the feedback I’d like to see by focusing on giving descriptive feedback to staff
    3. My next blog post will be on feedback

    thanks for inspiring many of us with this post

  7. Really interesting – can I show this (because of the Dylan Wiliam quotations) to my SMT who picked me up because students in my class (Year 12 – just a few weeks into their new course) didn’t know what grades they were working at because I write fullsome feedback on their essays but no grades. We are supposed to be an AfL school!

  8. I should have added – have you come across ‘Closing the gap prompts’ in marking work? Quite a good codification of marking to ‘make pupils think’.

  9. Thanks Cameron for the links!

    After reading Links 2 learning Online comment, It is just obvious now how much my struggling students are scared of me grading their work and how much they appreciate/want me to guide them, to comment so they can improve. I’m always giving a 2nd, 3rd chances to get something more.

    Thanks for the exchange!

  10. Cameron,
    I read the post and it reminded me of the importance of taking parents with us along this journey for so many governments are pushing grades on high stakes tests claiming that parents want this.
    I was facilitating a parent forum for about 70 years 5/6 parentslate last year and one of the parent questions raised was about grading homework.
    I challenged this notion of grading and provided an example where I coach basketball. I taught the skills and provided immediate feedback however when I put this into a competition with the first one to score 10 points they forgot the skills and just went for the basket.
    I then said this applies to grading – people forget the learning and focus on the grade. A question I still hear in the senior classes from students “is this on the test?” a dead give away for where the focus is.
    Thanks

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