Formative feedback is like a good murder…

The deadline for my MA assignment is in less than a month and I’ve made the executive decision to stop reading and start to get some words down. Blogs seem like a good way to procrastinate while feeling like I am doing something useful as I can hopefully borrow some of my thoughts from here and chuck them into the inquiry report. I’m relieved to stop reading but if I hadn’t delved through journals I wouldn’t have found the excitingly named ‘Focus on Formative Feedback’ (Shute 2008). At 47 pages I was hesitant about spending time poring over it, but it’s arguably the most useful piece of reading I’ve found on assessment. Anything that starts with a Russian proverb, and ends by claiming that formative feedback is like a good murder, is worth the printing costs. Shute looks at all those fiddly conflicting arguments surrounding feedback (“should I give long, detailed feedback? Some studies say it lowers the quality… some say it makes no difference… which is it?!”) and boils them down to some tidy Top Tips Tables on “What to Avoid” and “What to Do” (pages 30-33 if you’re in a hurry, by the way).

A big one which stood out for me when considering Whole Class Feedback (WCF) was the simple (yet obvious) idea that if the task given to students is too difficult/unattainable, they’ll lose interest; and if it’s too easy then any success they have with it is unlikely to result in and increase in learning. That’s so totally Vygotsky though and he’s way too mainstream so that’s a consideration for another day. With WCF it can be difficult to set the right tone, especially for a mixed ability class. In the few times I have used it this term with my Year 10 Computing class, their engagement dipped significantly after the first 20 minutes. I’d anticipated that the feedback they needed to respond to would take the better part of an hour so this was disappointing! The topic was dreary databases so there could be some reasons why they wanted to move on, but it did make me wonder if I’d pitched it at the wrong level as a number were struggling with their SQL to make it do what they needed it to do, when I had assumed they’d breeze through it after marking their work.

Some of Shute’s Top Tips that I have jotted down to consider and ensure I use when planning my WCF for next week are:

• Keep feedback simple but no simpler (like a tip that’s vague but not too vague, I guess… cheers!) – this will be trial and error and depend on the class. I’m conducting my inquiry with a single class so I am forming a better idea about what they can and cannot do, and what they expect/ want from my WCF.
• Remove uncertainty between performance and goals. This – from my interpretation – is as simple as making the success criteria clear and listed when I provide the feedback. Students like to know what they need to do to move forward so I need to provide as few obstacles as possible to help them access that.
• Focus feedback on the task, not the learner. This is similar to my last blog and I think I am going to avoid praising individual students for work, but will instead list (possibly show with pictures of work?) descriptions of the best pieces of work. The students it applies to will still know who they are.
• Avoid delivering feedback orally. This is an interesting one because I always assumed that verbal feedback could be just as strong as written. It’s interesting because she follows this tip up with “avoid only using text“. So a mix of both. I’m sure I can manage that. Like patting my head and rubbing my tummy at the same time.

I am feeling more confident about using WCF than I was at the beginning of the term. There are areas I need to improve upon to make it work for the students but that’s the whole point of inquiry research – ‘problematising’ and seeking to continually improve my own practice. Onwards and upwards!

Oh, and feedback is like a good murder because you need motive (the students need to want to do it), opportunity (the student receives the feedback within a reasonable timescale to respond) and means (the student is able and willing to use the feedback). Tenuous but that never stopped a metaphor before.

 

REFERENCES

Shute, V.J., 2008. Focus on formative feedback. Review of educational research, 78(1), pp.153-189.

My Issues with Whole Class Feedback

I love the idea of Whole Class Feedback. I love the enthusiastic blogs talking about how it’s eased the workloads of teachers who have tried it, and how it’s just as relevant and useful as writing out lots of individual comments. I really want to buy into it and go to my Deputy Head, waving evidence at him and proclaiming that our marking policy is not fit for purpose, and that personalised comments are a huge waste of everyone’s time. But I’m finding it difficult to believe that a single sheet of paper (or projected slide) for the whole class is going to provide better feedback than giving individual comments – verbal or written – to the students.

The question is not “does Whole Class Feedback” (ok, I’m going to just type WCF now – apologies for yet another educational acronym) work – of course having SOME feedback is going to be more beneficial to students than having none – but rather, is it better than the alternative of individualised comments to each student? It seems that while it may well solve a few problems, it brings up others that need to be addressed:

Student Motivaton

Black and Wiliam (1998) listed some key areas which must be met to claim that formative assessment (like WCF) is improved, one of which is the motivation and self-esteem of the students, following their feedback. They also emphasised that feedback should be about the “particular qualities” of the student’s work (which WCF fails to address) and should avoid comparisons with other pupils. Many of the WCF templates I have seen include praise for students who have done exceptionally well and whom the teacher believes deserve extra credit, and even named those students who did not do as well. Butler (1987) used the terms ‘task involvement’ and ‘ego involvement’ when describing motivation: task involvement where motivation is drawn from the individual mastering something; and ego involvement where motivation is drawn from the individual’s perceived self-worth against his or her peers. She found that in education, individual comments for feedback yielded higher task-involved perceptions and lower ego-involved ones. Given that we as teachers want to motivate students to complete tasks to a higher standard, it seems reasonable to argue we should avoid ego-involved motivation.

 

Lack of Dialogue 

For feedback to be truly effective, it needs to include a dialogue (Black & Wiliam, 1998); this does not necessarily need to be written. WCF restricts the ability for students to have a voice because they are all projected with the same message. How can they respond to feedback individually if they are all given the same message? This is something I struggle with – I suppose one alternative would be to speak to students while they work on an outcome in response to the WCF, but couldn’t this just be done from individual comments as well?

 

Lack of Detail

Lipnevich and Smith (2009) conducted some research into different types of feedback, part of which was whether students minded getting it from a computer. Worryingly, it seems students didn’t care whether their teacher or the T1000 wrote their comments… but that is a topic for another blog. With regards to WCF, they found that “students who did not receive detailed feedback obtained substantially lower final exam scores than those who received detailed feedback”. Which this seems obvious (you give kids more detailed feedback = they know more clearly what they have to do), this seems to be to be a strong argument against WCF which is just a set of simple statements given en-masse to students and is certainly not detailed.

 

I will give WCF a shot – I need to as part of my inquiry for my MA anyway, otherwise I wouldn’t have much to write about! – but the more I read, the more I question whether the only real benefit is that the teacher gains some time back which could be spent on other things like watching the new series of Black Mirror. This is the strongest argument in favour of WCF. If the teacher has 2 hours to do some work and spends all of that on marking, then there is an opportunity cost of any other work the teacher might do (planning, marking other classes, and so on). The Teaching & Learning Toolkit (Higgins et al., 2014) points out that individualised instructions aren’t very effective – which seems to point to WCF being better – but speculates that this is because the time spent on specific personal comments could be better spent elsewhere on providing other forms of feedback.

I can see how WCF would work, as it would allow for feedback to be given more frequently and there are certainly cases where the teacher may end up writing very similar comments repeatedly for most students. For any meaningful feedback to give targeted instruction on how to improve work, however, I’d argue that in the form I have seen and plan to trial there are still many areas where it falls short. I think in the first instance I will avoid named praise to reduce ‘ego-involvement’ motivation (but will list the qualities that the best pieces of work had instead). I will also do it alongside existing feedback; it is not going to replace individual comments.

 

 

REFERENCES

Black, P. and Wiliam, D., 1998. Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi delta kappan, 80(2), pp.139-148.

Butler, R., 1987. Task-involving and ego-involving properties of evaluation: Effects of different feedback conditions on motivational perceptions, interest, and performance. Journal of educational psychology, 79(4), p.474.

Higgins, S., Katsipataki, M., Kokotsaki, D., Coleman, R., Major, L.E., & Coe, R. (2013). The Sutton Trust-Education Endowment Foundation Teaching and Learning Toolkit. London: Education Endowment Foundation. [Available at http://www.educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/toolkit ]

Lipnevich, A.A. and Smith, J.K., 2009. Effects of differential feedback on students’ examination performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 15(4), p.319.

 

Whoops

So a good 2.5 years later and I return to make a blog post after stating I would aim to do one every month. That’s 30  or so posts overdue. At the beginning I didn’t think I had anything worth saying and thought I needed to write in here so that people could read my thoughts (ha!). Then weeks passed and turned into months, and term got well underway so I was too busy, and then it became too long since my initial post so it was all just a bit embarrassing.

So on reading my last entry it seems that I’d set myself some targets:

Follow through on ideas I have

I feel that I’ve been better at this. I definitely had a scatter gun approach to ideas, and any new fad I’d read about would be shoehorned into a few lessons before I forgot about it. We had dreadful results in Computing in the summer of 2016 and it forced me to focus on a few small initiatives which thankfully paid off and resulted in much better results the following year.

Support my ideas with research

I’ve definitely done this. Since signing up to a Masters (more on this below) I have gained access to much more research literature, but even with just Google Scholar I have broadened my view. I read blogs with a critical eye and I question my own practice in a way I did not used to do. I don’t think I would have done this without Twitter and ResearchEd so I’m very pleased that these exist for the modern teacher!

“I’m going to do it properly”

I’m not really sure what I meant by this. I did have a grand idea of introducing research in a more formal way and working with other staff but it died a pitiful death when everyone was just too busy to humour another of my silly ideas. I feel I am “doing it properly” by formalising it with an academic qualification though…

 

… Towards the end of the 2015/16 academic year, I decided to look into getting a Masters in Education. I was deeply ashamed of the poor undergraduate degree I gained in 2004 and how, whenever I filled out an application form, I had to put it down. I’m not really looking for jobs actively at the moment but it’s still something that bothered me. I wanted to prove to myself – and others! – that I could ‘do’ academia and I also wanted to approach university as a mature student, in both senses of the word. I applied to Brighton for a part-time MA (over 3 years) and while it has been very challenging and time-consuming at times, I don’t regret it at all and feel it has improved my practice.

Back to the reason for updating this blog FINALLY, though. Our current assignment involves using ‘Professional Inquiry Research’ and we have to undertake an inquiry into an area of our own practice. The evidence is not supposed to be stringent and significantly quantifiable; it should not deviate much from what we would already do as a practitioner should we trial a new teaching method in class. So no student surveys, no data analysis – simply “does this work and how can I improve my practice” in a cyclical way: it may be that I end up with more questions than answers but that is the purpose. One way of logging what we do so we can refer to our findings is to keep a journal so I have decided – COMMITTED! – to keeping a blog updated for the duration of the inquiry. The area I’m looking at is Whole Class Feedback which had a buzz on Twitter last year but has died down somewhat, but I believe is less a fad than some teaching ideas on there (COUGH Growth Mindset COUGH).

I’ll hopefully update this blog in a couple of days, as I intend to do some WCF marking soon and take some pics of what I have done and how it went. This blog is not going to be a work of art and there will be swathes of typos and poorly formed sentences. To anyone reading this: sorry. I probably won’t even proofread most of my posts.

…See you again in 2.5 years!