Flexible, fulfilling feedback

Taking Hattie's ideas and making a practical, free and accessible tool for teachers, students and peers to collaborate with 

There is much exploration and focus on feedback in schools at the moment - and for good reason. Feedback should be what drives learning and teaching, the direction learning takes and should help refine our practices and methods. Recently prompted to think about this by Assistant Principal and thought provoker extrodinaire Margo Edgar, I got started with these two resources;

The art of giving feedback

Left - John Hattie's Tedx Talk, Why are so many of our teachers and schools successful? November 2013 


Above - Link to STILE blog post The art of giving feedback: how knowledge transfer isn't our job anymore March 2015 

From this I established the key points Hattie was talking about;

• We still have teachers to act as mentors, facilitators,  inspiring co-learners, curiosity prompters to help learning happen and helping learners understand learning 
• Expertise has the biggest impact on learners - those that work collaboratively and those that understand impact rather than delivering content and working towards test scores are those that shine  
• Students and teachers who know what success is , work on tasks fed by feedback and who get multiple attempts at success signify where good learning happens
• Feedback should address: Where am I going (goals & success criteria), How am I going ( on/off task behaviour) and What do I do next (steps to develop deeper understanding and self regulation)
• Importantly feedback needs to empower learners to indicate how confident they are with their answer and use this to guide the type of feedback provided
• Feedback which praises effort rather than praises the students is more powerful in motivating learning 

What type of feedback? 

New task - feedback should centre on the task and how it is done

Developing understanding - feedback should look at strategies needed to perform

High degree proficiency - feedback should look at self regulation to foster independence and less dependence on teacher 

Which got me thinking - how can I help my peers and learners use feedback to help drive what next? How can I make the classroom inviting to come to and relevant? I started using feedback to help this. There are large amounts of Apps which help do this, though mostly this was one way feedback or right/wrong success feedback. Also it was on the spot, so how do students look back on where they have come from? Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Edmodo and Schoology allow for feedback dialogue between students and teachers. But I wanted to coach teachers and students to work together to build feedback linked to Hattie's suggestions. Thus the Google Form and Spreadsheet was formed! It allows students to input feedback based on prompts suggested once they indicate their confidence level. Then the teacher can respond as well based on the level of mastery and what they want advice on. Importantly it logs the conversations/reflections for future use. 

I found it works best when each student sets up their own template (publish the template to the gallery and students download it and rename it to include their own name) and shares it with the teacher - that way their feedback is a dialogue between the learner, the teacher and in the future peers they allow to access it. If you want access to this Google Form please contact me and we can add it to your Google Apps for Ed account. 

View live feedback form

View live summary of feedback

Please note the live versions above are just trials - no student data is visible 

What next?

I think it would be great to simplify this model - to make a quick 1 minute format that allows students to provide instant feedback - a Google Form would work but it would need to be simpler - with one click and short text responses. Also using it with learners highlighted the ongoing need to foster understanding of why, when and how we use feedback with students. I am also thinking about developing a 1 page infographic for teachers regarding feedback for those using platforms like Edmodo so they can still apply Hattie's thinking but to a feedback loop they have already established.