Introduced by Danielle Mynes
Tuesday 17th January 2017
Imagine playing golf in the dark: with no idea of where the ball travelled after each stroke, you would have no reliable way of gauging and improving your performance. Today, this frustrating situation was offered as an analogy for student progress being hampered by inadequate feedback.
Dylan William identifies some crucial principles that should underpin feedback, including the following: ‘feedback should cause thinking…and it should be more work for the recipient than the donor’ (Embedded Formative Assessment, 2011). Today’s forum provided a number of techniques for ensuring feedback leads to effortful thinking on the part of our students.
William’s own first strategy for embedding formative assessment involves ‘clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and success criteria’, and today’s session provided a useful model for thinking about this. A distinction was suggested between ‘Scooby Doo’ teachers and ‘Blue Peter’ teachers. The Scooby Doo approach leaves the learner mired in mystery until the ‘big reveal’: only after the learner has completed a task is the nature of success unveiled. The ‘Blue Peter’ teacher, on the other hand, will provide a model of success they ‘made earlier’ to help guide the learner’s efforts, and to provide a point of reference for subsequent feedback.
A simple technique discussed in today’s forum was the use of ‘purple pens of progress.’ Purple pens might be used for self or peer assessment, or for learners to re-draft and edit their work in response to feedback given by a peer or a teacher. Frequent use of ‘purple penning’ helps to make a habit of active engagement in the process of feedback, and helps teachers and learners to see if, and how, feedback really is leading to progress and improved outcomes.
Finally, there was also discussion of how feedback should not be seen as something that happens only ‘after’ a sequence of learning has unfolded. On the contrary, pre-assessments can be immensely powerful in providing teachers with feedback on what (different) students already know, and with which areas of a topic they are likely to need most support.
As William argues ‘teaching is a contingent activity [in that] we cannot predict what students will learn as a result of any particular sequence of instruction’; as such, teachers and students need a regular stream of feedback to help them course-correct as they struggle towards mastery.
For more of information, see the PowerPoint below.
Teachers as Learners @ JCG 