[MUSIC] In this session were going to be focusing on feedback. As early career teachers, both Linda and I taught English in a secondary school. I certainly spent time - way too much time - on the weekends marking dutifully, putting comments on learner's work and providing it back on Monday. And to my dismay, what would they do? They'd take a look at their mark, they'd take a look at their friend's mark, and then they'd often crumple it up and put it in their binders or in their desk or in their backpacks never to be seen again. The person who is doing most of the learning there was me, not the learner. We've learned so much about feedback from the work of John Hattie and Dylan Wiliams, and others, that we really need to be thinking very specifically about, what is it that we're doing when we're providing feedback to learners on their work? How are we holding them accountable for what they're doing with that feedback? And how does it connect to the growth and fixed mindset that Linda talked about at the beginning of this course? So, what do we know about feedback now? We know that quality feedback should be. focused on the learning intention of the task. So, if we're not providing feedback on twenty different things - we're making it very, very specific. It needs to occur as learners are doing the learning. While there's still an opportunity for them to act on the feedback that we're giving, and to deepen their knowledge. We need to provide feedback on how and what the learner understands and misunderstands, so it's really clear - "you've got this, you're not so sure about this". And it needs to assist the learner in knowing what their next step is. So, we can think about the distinction between evaluative feedback and descriptive feedback. So, evaluative feedback provides a value on the appropriateness of the response. Is it right, or is it wrong? Do you get it or do you not? Is it seven out of ten, or two out of ten? We're placing a judgment on the correctness and the value of the work. There's not too much that a learner can do with that, except reinforce their view of themselves as learners. What we want to do is think more about the kind of descriptive feedback that we provide where learners have an opportunity to act on it. So, we want to provide descriptions of why a response is appropriate. We want to provide descriptions of what they have done well, what they've achieved. We need to provide suggestions of better ways of doing things, and we need to provide prompts to suggest ways students can improve. And one of the biggest things is that less is more. Again, thinking back to myself as a early-career English teacher, I thought that I was a wonderful teacher if I provided a whole paragraph of suggestions for learners. It was really not such a hot idea, what I should have been doing is, underlining one or two things that they had done quite well, in the piece of writing and provided one, at most two, strategies for what they needed to do next. In our schools, sometimes that's called two stars and a next step. What did you do well and what's your next step? That's descriptive feedback. Weaker kind of feedback is when we only give them the knowledge of their results or their grades, and that's called knowledge of results. I know how I did, but I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it. Whereas stronger feedback learners are given information about what's working, some explanation about what they need to do next, and some specific activities to undertake in order to improve. Most athletic coaches do this naturally. If you are coaching a basketball team, you never say "Well, you got three out of ten out on that layout. You know, try a little bit harder." The coach will breakdown the skill into specific steps, and then the participant, the athlete has a chance to keep practicing, and practicing, and practicing. The same in music, the same in drama, the same in in fine art. We need to take that kind of thinking that's natural in those areas, and bring it into our academic areas as well. So, our whole invitation for you is to think about the way you provide feedback to your learners, what they're expected to do with the feedback and who is getting the most learning from the feedback? Is it you? Or is it your learner? As we move you into the next the next part of this course, we're going to be thinking hard about teacher professional learning, and how important it is for us as teachers to always be learning ourselves. And, we hope that you are enjoying this part of the course so far. And I look forward to our next steps. [MUSIC]
