Teachers spend too much time teaching. Now there's a concept guaranteed to provoke a reaction in a room full of teachers. Nonetheless, that's precisely the message put across by Grant Wiggins during a session at ASCD's 2005 Conference on Teaching and Learning, held last fall in San Francisco. The coauthor (along with Jay McTighe) of ASCD's acclaimed Understanding by Design and The Understanding by Design Handbook contends that the essence of good instruction lies not in presentation of content—teaching—but in assessing student learning and coaching students toward better performance.
"We're paid to coach learners, not teach content," Wiggins asserted in his presentation. That's more important now than ever. State and local learning standards, love 'em or hate 'em, spell out reasonably specific measures of what students should know and be able to do.
Standards give students a performance target to aim for and offer teachers a basis for providing feedback that will help students achieve high performance. Providing feedback, Wiggins argues, is one of the most fundamental teaching skills. Designing and using feedback systems gives teachers a way to assess student learning on the fly—while the learning is still happening—and make midcourse corrections to help maximize student performance.
"Common Sense That We Don't Honor"
Paradoxically, said Wiggins, the rise of standards sometimes leads teachers to spend lesstime giving feedback to students. When standards create a prescriptive environment—dictating what's to be taught and how—feedback and ongoing formative assessment get short shrift.
This is especially a problem in schools where the results of high-stakes testing are used to evaluate the overall effectiveness of instruction.
"In the world of standards, people are inclined to teach much more and give much less feedback," noted Wiggins. Less feedback means less time spent practicing, thinking about, and mastering new material, and that makes it less likely that students will meet the standards. "To meet standards, you need lots of attempts to try to meet the standards and to get feedback. A kid's first and fifth try are not going to work. In a world of standards and textbooks and syllabi, people over-plan. They don't build in time for feedback use."
He continued, "This is common sense that we don't honor as teachers. We get fixated on the inputs, the content, and not enough on the desired output: resultant quality performance. The result is superficial. To get quality performance, you need feedback. So you have to plan free space in the syllabus for feedback and its use. You don't see it in mainstream classrooms very much."
Beyond Advice and Praise
Few teachers simply deliver a lecture and expect students to thoroughly absorb the information. They interact with their students in a variety of ways. A math teacher perhaps regularly offers tips on how to solve problems. A language-arts teacher provides clues on how to decipher a new word. And most teachers offer praise to students who are making progress.
But Wiggins believes that this doesn't add up to feedback.
"Feedback is different from advice or guidance. It's also different from praise or blame," he asserted. "Feedback is information. ‘Good job!’ is not feedback; it's praise. Praise isn't information; it's affirmation. I think we give too much advice without the kid understanding why we're giving the advice. We give too much advice and not enough feedback. So the student has a rigid interpretation of advice that puts them in no position to fluently and flexibly perform."
Wiggins defined feedback fairly simply: "Feedback tells you what you just did. Feedback is information you can use. It's descriptive and useful information about what you did and didn't do in light of a goal."
A Feedback System, a Learning System
Making sure students understand that goal is a critical first step in creating a useful feedback system. In many cases, the state or local standard provides the measure, but it is the teacher's job to help students understand that standard.
"If you want me, as a student, to meet the standard, then you better make sure I know what the standard is," Wiggins advised. "We have to work very hard to eliminate mystery and secrecy, so that the student never says, ‘I don't know what you want.’ We have to minimize opaqueness, mystery, and secrecy about what excellence is."
For learning to work, students also need to understand what a masterful performance looks like. In the initial stages of the learning process, good teachers demonstrate and model the behavior, skill, or knowledge at hand. "You can't achieve a goal as a learner without a clear model of what you're trying to accomplish. If you want people to achieve a result, they need a model of what you want them to achieve," Wiggins said.
After giving students an opportunity to try out their learning and practice their newfound skill, it's time for the feedback. Wiggins said good feedback is timely, ongoing, expert, accurate, and consistent. It is user-friendly in approach and amount, descriptive, and specific regarding the desired performance. It is honest yet constructive.
Some good feedback doesn't rely on anything the teacher does. When a speaker sees the audience on the edge of their seats and the room gets still, she knows she is doing well. A diver who can watch a side-by-side video comparison of two attempts gets good feedback simply by observing.
For other kinds of learning, however, the teacher needs to set the feedback loop in motion. Wiggins offered these examples of good feedback:
- "You are watching the pitcher's face, not the ball."
- "At the end of this paragraph in the story you wrote, I felt puzzlement over the character's motives; was that your intent?"
- "In all the problems you got right, you present a logical rationale; in most of the ones you got wrong, you really don't show your work or your reasoning."
- "You spent about a third of the time reading from the paper and not looking at your audience. I also counted 41 ‘ums.’"
Feedback like this lets students assess themselves. It doesn't tell them what to do, but it does help them understand where to make improvements. Opportunities for self-assessment and self-correction are vital parts of the feedback process. Further, a teacher's careful observation of student performance can offer cues about where additional information or instruction might be helpful.
Assessment That Works
Thus, feedback functions as a truly practical kind of assessment—one that Wiggins argues is far more valuable than tests or grades. "Letter grades do not communicate anywhere near the level of information you need in a competency-based system," he said.
"What [students] say in their self-assessment will reveal to you whether they understand the goal and the purpose and what quality looks like," Wiggins asserted. "You may find that they fixate on things that are relatively unimportant, and that will tell you reams about the adjustments you need to make."
Wiggins said he doesn't advocate doing away with tests; he just doesn't want schools to rely on them to make decisions about how to help individual students learn.
"I'm not saying let's get rid of testing. I'm saying if the only feedback system you have about how you are doing against state standards is one test at the end of the year that you don't know the results of until the summer, that's a dumb system," Wiggins observed. "You've got to know how you're doing in November and February and March against May standards so you can make adjustments before it's too late."
Wiggins encourages all teachers to incorporate feedback strategies into their portfolios. Doing so doesn't require an entirely new set of instructional skills, just the conscientious and purposeful application of things most good teachers try to do every day.
"You can start really small," Wiggins said. "You can practice giving feedback to see how it goes with just a lesson or a unit."
He is convinced that learners will benefit.
"I'm asking you to apply common sense to curriculum and assessment," Wiggins said. "It's going to overturn a lot of habits and traditions. Feedback and results are not the coin of the realm in most American schools; the textbook and the syllabus are. I'm asking you to challenge the longstanding assumption that the syllabus, the framework, the pacing guide, the content is what matters. No, it's not. It's the results that matter. We need feedback against the desired results."
What Makes Good Feedback?
Are quick and ongoing, taking place right after or during the learning.
Are contextual, an integral part of the learning or activity.
Address individual learners and their progress, not the whole class.
Present a manageable amount of information so students can process and act on it.
Model or demonstrate the desired behavior.
Are specific.
Break tasks into component parts.
Provide opportunities to try the activity again.
Are descriptive, not evaluative.
Include what learners didn't do in addition to what they did do.
Use a shared vocabulary that all learners can understand.
Rely on mutual trust, the belief that the teacher and students are partners in the feedback process.