September 2012 | Volume 70 | Number 1

Feedback for Learning

Finessing Feedback

Marge Scherer

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Seven Keys to Effective Feedback

Grant Wiggins

Students may feel that they receive feedback throughout the school day: "You need more examples in your report." "I'm so pleased by your poster." "This paper is not your best work—you earned a C." "Great job!" But such comments—in which teachers offer advice, praise, criticism, or evaluation—don't provide the kind of descriptive feedback that can help students improve their performance, writes Grant Wiggins in this article.

Feedback, says Wiggins, is "information about how we are doing in our efforts to reach a goal." Helpful feedback is always goal-referenced: The performer has a clear goal, and the feedback tells whether he or she is on track or needs to make adjustments. Helpful feedback is also tangible, actionable, user-friendly, timely, ongoing, and consistent. Fortunately, the teacher is not the only possible source of effective feedback—peers, other teachers, technology, and instruction that builds in intrinsic feedback are equally powerful. But it's essential to provide as much descriptive feedback as possible, says Wiggins, because "the research shows that less teaching plus more feedback is the key to achieving greater learning."

Part of an issue on "Feedback for Learning."

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Know Thy Impact

John Hattie

"There is as much effective as ineffective feedback," writes noted researcher John Hattie. This seemingly innocent statement immediately translates into another: Teachers are giving a lot of feedback out there, and not all of it is good! So how can educators tell the difference between effective and noneffective feedback? How can they use feedback to more accurately assess the effect of their teaching? Hattie shows readers how to become "adaptive experts" who investigate and diagnose student responses. He shares insights about providing the right level of feedback relative to the proficiency level of the learner. And he cautions us about the dual dangers of praise and peer feedback as he steers us in the direction of what really works.

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Preventing Feedback Fizzle

Susan M. Brookhart

"Feedback without a learning target is just somebody telling you what to do," notes feedback guru Susan Brookhart. So what's a teacher to do? Set the feedback in context, advises the author. This means paying attention to what happens beforehand—that's establishing a learning target so students have a reference point for using the feedback they receive—and to what happens afterward—that's giving students the opportunity to digest, understand, and use the feedback. See what feedback looks like when it fizzles—and when it sparkles. And see what breaks the author's heart about the feedback that so many well-intentioned teachers give to their students. Three trusty tips will put you on the path to providing great feedback.

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Feedback: Part of a System

Dylan Wiliam

In engineering, feedback is part of a system, and its role is to keep the system working. For example, consider the domestic room thermostat. Feedback that the current temperature is lower than the desired setting automatically triggers a response—turning on the heating system. Without the response, the feedback serves no purpose.

In education, it's equally important—but unfortunately more complicated—to elicit a desirable response to feedback, writes Dylan Wiliam in this article. The research on feedback, including an analysis of all well-designed studies from 1905 to 1995, has found mixed results—most likely because much of this research has not recognized the importance of recipient response. Students respond differently to feedback depending on many factors, including their beliefs about intelligence, their experiences with other teachers, their attitudes about the subject matter, and their relationship with the teacher. That's why teachers who use feedback to maximum effect must get to know their students well and establish a classroom environment in which all students feel safe making mistakes and believe they can improve with effort. Wiliam makes several recommendations for establishing such an environment.

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"How Am I Doing?"

Jan Chappuis

When Jan Chappuis's daughter Claire brought home a math paper with a -3, a smiley face, and an M at the top, Chappuis asked her what she thought the marks meant she knew. Claire looked puzzled and said "Math." When asked what she thought she needed to learn, she looked more puzzled and said, "Math?" Because the marks on the paper did not tell Claire what she's good at or what she needs to keep working on, her paper did not function as effective feedback. In this article, Chappuis describes five characteristics of effective feedback:

It points out strengths in the work and offers specific information to guide improvement.

It occurs during the learning, while there is still time for the student to act on it.

It addresses partial understanding. If a student's work doesn't demonstrate a partial understanding, then reteaching, rather than feedback, is needed.

Effective feedback does not do the thinking for the student. For example, feedback on a writing assignment might not correct errors but simply indicate where the errors are.

Effective feedback limits corrective information to an amount the student can act on.

For feedback to be effective, students must act on it, and they're more likely to act on feedback when their teachers look closely at their work to understand what they understand and identify where they need help. Such feedback communicates to students that their teachers are listening to them, which increases the likelihood that students will trust their teachers enough to follow their advice.

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Making Time for Feedback

Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey

Teachers know that giving students effective, ongoing feedback is crucial—but where can they find the time? And even when they do find it, how likely is the student to actually read and absorb the comments? There must be a better way—and authors Fisher and Frey have found it. They suggest several time-saving ways of approaching the feedback problem. Some rules of thumb? Don't mark every mistake a student makes; concentrate on errors instead. Rather than waste all that time catching isolated errors, look for patterns because this will show you what you need to reteach—and to whom. Finally, guide students' thinking so they take responsibility for their learning. If they learn how to think about their mistakes and errors, they won't take the easy way out and just look to you for the "right" information.

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Feedback Is a Two-Way Street

Cris Tovani

Cris Tovani, a high school language arts teacher, used to spend a lot of time trying to provide the perfect feedback to inspire her students' learning. In this article, Tovani tells what happened when she realized that the feedback students give can be just as powerful as the feedback they get. Gathering feedback from students—through such strategies as individual conferences, student response forms, small-group discussions, and exit cards—is now an integral part of Tovani's instructional cycle. When you don't know how to help a student, she advises, it's surprisingly effective to simply ask, "What do you need?"

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"Look at My Drawing!"

Maja Wilson

A young child stands in front of you, paper held out, demanding, "Look at My Drawing!" Many teachers and parents treasure this moment because it makes them feel needed and because the child and the drawing are so cute. But the way we respond to this moment can tell us a lot about the power and purpose of feedback, writes Maja Wilson in this article.

Wilson provides two extended examples of feedback: a dialogue she had with Noah, a 4-year-old student who sought feedback on his drawing of a porcupine; and the commentary provided by educator Peter Elbow on a college student's writing assignment. By deeply reflecting on these examples, Wilson demonstrates how feedback can go beyond praise or criticism. What students seek from feedback, she asserts, is engagement with other people and with the work they are doing. The best feedback therefore has three goals—to improve the student's product; to support the student's healthy view of himself or herself as an active learner; and to help the student learn what it means to be an artist, a writer, a scientist, a historian—in short, a learner and creator in any field.

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How to Know What Students Know

William Himmele and Pérsida Himmele

Here's a scene familiar to all of us: The teacher starts out a lesson with the traditional question-and-answer session. He or she asks a question directed at the entire class, waits for hands to go up, and then selects one of the few hands raised. But what about the other students? Are they with us—and how do we know? According to the authors, if we start out like this, we're doing things backward. They suggest, instead, several techniques that engage all students with the content and, at the same time, promote higher-order thinking. See what the chalkboard splash, the debate team carousel, and picture notes look like in practice. These techniques are particularly successful with students who struggle to articulate what they know, such as shy students, English language learners, students receiving learning support, and unmotivated or disengaged students.

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Guiding the Budding Writer

Peter Johnston

"What's this draft about?" may not seem like encouraging feedback to a young writer. But a pointed question like this, Peter Johnston maintains, can direct a writer to think more deeply about what he or she is aiming to say. Johnston notes that the traditional concept of feedback as telling students what's good or bad about their writing—or their performance in math, science, or other fields—is unhelpful. Instead, we should deliver feedback as questions, as neutral observations of accomplishment ("You gave five complete examples"), or as whole-class conversation about the choices various writers make. To give feedback that strengthens learners' motivation and persistence, teachers should keep five principles in mind: A learning context in which students are truly engaged makes feedback more palatable; fostering peer feedback is important; good feedback focuses on the processes a learner used; praise isn't the best way to give a positive message; and feedback focused on judging the learner (even positively) can backfire.

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Learning from the True Customers

Gregory Kaster

If a business wants to improve, the business owners know they need to ask the customers what's working and what isn't. In the case of schools, who has a better understanding of what works and what doesn't in a school than the schools' "customers"—the students? Gregory Kaster, principal of Madison Elementary School in Marshfield, Wisconsin, regularly asks students how the school could improve. Students share ideas in monthly small-group meetings, regular whole-class discussions, and exit interviews as they prepare to leave middle school?

Students' ideas have often focused on logistical issues, such as congestion in the lunchroom and the school parking lot. They have also been passionate about misbehavior in the bathrooms, a subject they kept returning to even when Kaster tried to steer the conversation to bigger issues, such as bullying. Suggestions for improving instruction have included offering more project-based learning and using more technology. Students helped school leaders prepare for standardized testing by offering input on how they could be grouped on test day and on what kinds of incentives would encourage them to do their best. Despite some teachers' concerns that students would use such opportunities as exit interviews to vent about teachers they disliked, Kaster has found that students are respectful and honored to get the chance to share their views. And their ideas have helped make Madison a more student-friendly place.

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Feedback in an Age of Efficiency

T. Philip Nichols

In 1964, ELIZA, a computer developed by Joseph Weizenbaum as an experiment in artificial intelligence, listened to people's stories and responded in such human ways that people seemed to forget the machine couldn't really understand them. According to T. Philip Nichols, the ELIZA project illustrates how easy it is to conflate technical feedback with meaningful response. Technology has enabled schools to make feedback quantifiable, systematic, and scalable. But at what cost?

In the name of efficiency, schools are increasingly reliant on quantifiable measures as a primary avenue for feedback. But such measures lead students and parents to focus more on numerical scores than on what students have learned. So how can teachers reorient their classrooms to focus on learning and growth? Nichols offers three suggestions:

Make time for meaningful discussions about student work.

Value qualitative behaviors over quantitative scores.

Acknowledge student growth over time.

Although teachers cannot change the system overnight, Nichols believes it is possible and important to create space for nuanced human responses in classrooms.

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Keeping the Destination in Mind

Angela Di Michele Lalor

Wouldn't you turn off a global positioning system that gave you directions for getting somewhere other than your desired destination? So, Lalor argues, would a student whose teacher gave him or her feedback that was unrelated to that student's learning goal. Just as a working GPS tells a driver precisely where he or she is on a trip toward a specific place, a teacher delivering feedback should tell a student precisely where he or she is in relation to mastering a specific learning goal. Good feedback lets a student know what he's done right so far—and when he has stalled or taken a wrong turn or and needs to head in a different direction. Using extended examples from different grade levels, Lalor advises teachers to use a three-part protocol to give feedback on student work: (1) emphasize the strengths in the work; (2) discuss questions or problems about the work in relation to the specific assignment; and (3) suggest "next steps" for improving the work.

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Double Take

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Teaching Argument

Robert J. Marzano

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Good Feedback Is Targeted, Specific, Timely

Bryan Goodwin and Kirsten Miller

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Electronic Feedback

Doug Johnson

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Getting in a Time Machine

Thomas R. Hoerr

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What Heather Taught Me

Carol Ann Tomlinson

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A Time When Feedback Made a Difference

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Index to Advertisers

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ASCD Community in Action

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EL Takeaways

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How Feedback Leads to Engagement

Jane E. Pollock

Walk into any classroom and within 10 minutes, you'll notice some students disengage, even openly laying their heads on their desks. Like a canary in a coal mine, these "telltale" students signal that classroom instruction isn't capturing their attention. One way teachers can re-engage telltale students is by setting up classroom routines that help such students regularly seek feedback about their own learning progress—from a source other than the classroom teacher. Pollock describes three techniques she's helped teachers put in place to boost student engagement through seeking feedback (including from peers and from themselves): (1) Goal accounting templates that students fill out at the start of class; (2) an interactive notebook in which students process their questions and thoughts about material the teacher presents as they take notes; and (3) a teacher scoring roster that gives teachers a quick read of how well each student knows the content.

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Going for the Growth

Julia H. Dermody

Jose easily memorized the multiplication tables for the lower numbers, and teachers often told Jose—an English language learner—that he was "smart." So why was he stuck on mastering the 5s tables? Dermody, Jose's teacher, realized that Jose's problem was his attitude about effort. Because the lower math facts came to him easily, he believed the higher ones should also, with no need for studying on his part. Dermody discusses how essential it is for students—especially English language learners—to develop a growth mindset, a belief that their intelligence is malleable and they can achieve more if they expend more effort. Too many at-risk students hold a fixed mindset, a belief that they are born with just so much brainpower and can't learn more by trying harder. She describes how giving her elementary age ELL students growth mindset feedback—feedback that contributes to their sense of themselves as learners who can boost their achievement by trying their hardest, increased her students' confidence and achievement.

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EL Study Guide

Teresa Preston

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Inservice Guest Blogger: Grant Wiggins http://inservice.ascd.org/category/educational-leadership/

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Watch This Spot!

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