How to elaborate effective feedback
What's the key to effective feedback?
As we have seen, feedback is essential for your students to learn. However, some teachers can be reluctant to giving personalized feedback comments because they find it very time-consuming. We can overcome this problem if we learn how to give effective feedback.
Do you want to learn how to give constructive and relevant, yet agile and sustainable feedback comments, that will help your students learn? Make sure you have the four pieces to your effective feedback puzzle!
Piece 1: Follow the two-part structure
Feedback comments should have 2 parts:
- How did your student do? Comment on their work. Comments can be positive or negative, but always constructive.
- How could your student do better? Help them see how they could improve. This must be applicable to the product and to similar future tasks.
Here’s an example for you. Laura has written an argumentative essay on the benefits of recycling.
“Laura, you have organized your ideas in clearly separate paragraphs. Your essay could be even better by adding a closing paragraph to sum up your ideas, to give your text a sense of closure.”
Careful! What if we say: “Laura, you got an 8/10 in your writing, it’s good but can still be better”? That wouldn’t be considered feedback, because it gives Laura no information about the positive/negative aspects of her work, nor about how to improve.
Piece 2: Comment on your student's work
- Congratulations on your poster, Tom! You’re so smart.
-
Your poster is great! It’s very clear, organized and attractive, Tom.
What’s the difference between the two?
The first comment focuses on Tom, whereas the second one focuses on his work. Feedback should be directed at the poster, because we’re not judging Tom here, but his work. What the teacher does in the first comment is what we call “praise”.
Comments like “good girl/boy”, “well done” and “you're really good at this” are well-intended, yet completely focus on the pupil. This makes them more likely to attribute your praise to general traits (such how brilliant they are) than to specific actions they have taken. But what happens if they do something wrong? Students are more likely to perceive failure in the same way if they believe that their success is determined by who they are. When things don't work out, they think it's because they're not good enough, and they have no control over it.
Piece 3: Focus on the key points
When you give your feedback, prioritize those aspects that stand out from your student’s work and focus on those. Getting too much feedback can be overwhelming for your students. They’re still learning, and learning takes time.
Remember that when you give them feedback, they will have to “digest” that; they will have to create meaning and plan their next steps to improve. To keep it short and simple, you can focus on 1 to 3 points. Also, keep in mind that we should give sustainable feedback. If we give students too many comments, we won’t have the time to attend everyone.
Piece 4: Give timely feedback
Remember that the key aspect of assessment for learning is that feedback can help students learn. If we want this to happen, it’s important that we plan moments for feedback throughout the learning process.
Effective feedback can be very powerful because it helps students know how they’re doing and how to improve. To do that, we need to give them feedback while they still have time to adjust their work.
