Think about the last time you did a mildly onerous chore. Washing up, painting the bathroom, cooking for your in laws, tidying the shed. And then you were given "feedback". How did that make you feel?
Feedback on pupils' work is a highly sensitive moment. Especially when set about with expectations, policies to be policed, and rituals performed for Ofsted and other external parties.
The main recipient of feedback from marking work is the teacher. It is the teacher who gets the picture of how learning is progressing. It's the teacher who has to reflect on what that snapshot means and what to do next. And that does include how to take pupils with you on that journey. Both in terms of the specifics of that piece of work, but also in terms of their progression as a learner.
This means that feedback is much more than a comment in red ink that the pupil has to respond to. Especially given how I responded last time I was given feedback on whether I had actually hoovered in the corners behind the bookcase.
Here are some dangers of feedback:
- A mark can feel like a judgement.
- A comment can feel like a criticism.
- A snapshot can feel like an outcome.
- A snapshot presented as an outcome can feel as if it defines the learner.
- A push for progress can make learners feel as if nothing is ever good enough.
Just like when I cooked for my in-laws, what I wanted was appreciation and validation. And from that would come a drive to want to carry on and excel myself in future. To take responsibility for hoovering in the corners to kill any carpet beetles, to get the alloy wheels clean without transferring the oily blackness to the rest of the car. To be in a position where I am not feeling defensive, but rather I actively seek out advice from someone I think has tips I can use and standards I can aspire to.
Knowing work will be marked can be a strong incentive for pupils to push themselves. If we understand this, we also need to understand the desire for approval and appreciation that lies behind this. And put them in the position of being the ones who want to make it even better.
Here's what happened with my Year 8 group when I got it wrong. And hopefully managed to rescue things.
My Year 8 are learning to write about their town. They are also learning to give and justify opinions, link ideas, and make their work personal and coherent. And they are learning to challenge themselves to work more and more independently, recycling a growing repertoire.
They are in the early stages of this, both in terms of this unit on My Town, and in terms of the whole of Year 8 where although we will change topics, the core language and their ability to deploy it will remain central.
But because of assessment deadlines and policies and also managing my own work load, I gave them feedback on a piece of work done early in the process. Which risked a situation where I was commenting on a work in progress as if it were the finished article. Like someone helpfully standing idly by pointing out all the bits I missed as I washed the car.
This resulted in one pupil's work getting 5 out of 10. The idea being that it wasn't a judgement, but simply a tally of the criteria they had or hadn't met yet. But would they see it like that? The five bullet points above all come into play. And the learner could easily take from this, "My work is bad. I am a bad learner. I am bad at French. I hate French."
I had to put the pupils back in the driving seat. (Yes. Mixed metaphors. I know.) That's where this came in:
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| Pupils use coloured felt tips to mark up paragraphs. |
The pupils are given the role of assessing the paragraphs. Plus everyone loves using the felt tips. They were very critical of the first one, with its repetition of il y a and et. So I was able to point out that this person was on the same journey as us, and that we too had started out with sentences like this. They spotted the paragraph that would have been fantastic had they linked their ideas better. And they were good at recognising that as well as annotating whether each person had used each of the colours, we should also pay attention to what they were writing; whether it felt personal, relevant or coherent.
So next we did this.
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| Pupils use the same criteria to mark up their own paragraph I had marked. |
They used the colours to annotate their own paragraph. This overrode and superceded my marking and made it their own.
Most importantly they then went on to do this:
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| Pupils write a new version and mark it up. |
They wrote and marked up a new version of their paragraph which hoovers into all the corners and polished away all the smears.
I could stop there. But I do want to show you the 5 out of 10 example and how badly I messed up by giving it that mark. And how hopefully we rescued the situation. And how even after redoing it, we are still on a journey together because it's not yet the finished article. These are a series of snapshots on an exciting journey, not a disappointing final destination:
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| A first attempt paragraph that I marked badly and which the pupil then marked up. |
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| The same pupil's second attempt. |
