Effective Feedback
There is no such thing as a silver bullet in education, but effective feedback comes very close. The EEF places effective feedback as something that, when done well, adds six months to pupil progress. Only metacognition and self-regulation comes higher. The EEF also talks about it as a low-cost strategy. But is it? Is feedback ‘free’? After all, marking and feedback is often cited as a huge workload issue. Large amounts of time, both within and outside school, is spent colour-coding, highlighting and commenting on pupils’ work. The time cost is huge. This is something that I certainly recognise. While I wholeheartedly recognise the importance of feedback, my experience of marking has been complicated. In my first year of teaching, I found myself in floods of tears in my NQT meeting, exhausted after spending every day of the half-term holidays marking book work and assessments.
The school’s policy at the time – that every page needed written comments – nearly drove me to the edge. And it was useless. What impact was writing ‘good notes’ having on pupils? I was so far behind that I was, in some cases, marking work that pupils had completed a month ago. Were my comments going to make a difference? I had not yet realised the impact of pupils actively engaging with feedback, so books were filled with comments that pupils – at best – read. At worst, my comments remained unseen. Since then, I have encountered various iterations of marking: triple marking, acknowledgement marking, verbal feedback stamps… And they all lacked impact. Or, worse, they potentially hampered progress. At the time, I put this down to the form of marking and feedback. But is this the thing that leads children down a dead end? Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating a return to verbal feedback stamps.
Feedback is a continual process, cycling between instruction and frequent opportunities to check understanding. It is not linear. And it certainly isn’t, being at the end of an assessment. Another key consideration is when to offer feedback.
It’s with this in mind, that the Trust focus on live marking emerged.
Kirsty McMurdo, Trust Head of Teaching and Practitioner Development
To read Kirsty’s full article please use the link: Effective Feedback by Kirsty McMurdo