Feedback, Feedback, Feedback

John Hattie and Helen Timperley wrote, in The Power of Feedback (2007), that

Effective teaching not only involves imparting information and understandings to students (or providing constructive tasks, environments, and learning) but also involves assessing and evaluating students' understanding of this information, so that the next teaching act can be matched to the present understanding of the students.

Hattie and Timperley referred to this second part of teaching as feedback and related it to the following three questions: Where am I going? How am I going? and Where to next?

Where am I going?
"A critical aspect of feedback is the information given to students and their teachers about the attainment of learning goals related to the task or performance." Locke and Latham, 1990 go on to say, "Goals are more effective when students share a commitment to attaining them, because they are more likely to seek and receive feedback."

Defining a clear learning target and communicating it in student friendly terms is something I ask staff to do on a daily basis. To accomplish this we have incorporated Daily Objective/Learning Target boards and staff state and re-state the learning target while engaging students throughout a block of learning time. When I enter classrooms I frequently ask the students to share with me what they are "doing" and what their "learning target" is. The goal is to get away from answers like "math" and "reading" and progress to answers like, "We are comparing and contrasting characters in these two novels" or "We are adding fractions by finding a common denominator."

How am I going?
"Answering this question involves a teacher (or peer, task, or self) providing information relative to a task or performance goal, often in relation to some expected standard, to prior performance, and/or to success or failure on a specific part of the task."

Setting goals and continually monitoring performance related to that goal or learning target is an essential component of the learning process. When students play an active role in the learning process, through goal setting, they are more able to answer the question, "How am I going?" In my opinion, there should be no surprises in the learning process. Students and teachers both must understand the clear learning target, how to accomplish this target and a sense of when this learning target has been met. This portion must be about the "how". We accomplish this through learning logs, journal entries, daily formative and formal assessment methods.

Where to next?
"Instruction often is sequential, with teachers providing information, tasks, or learning intentions; students attempting tasks; and some subsequent consequence."

Hattie and Timperley would argue that in order to accomplish this, it does not always involve "more" work for students. I compare this to often considering the method of teaching things slower and louder if students to do understand the first time around. While this is not an effective teaching strategy, neither is providing more of the same. We must continue to look for ways to challenge how students and teachers look at and think about learning goals, how we continue to promote a deeper understanding of the previously defined learning target.


REFERENCES:

The Power of Feedback
John Hattie; Helen Timperley
Review of Educational Research; Mar 2007; 77, 1; Academic Research Library
pg. 81

Original Image Credit: Aiming for the Gold by Joe Hagan
www.flickr.com/photos/focal1x/391711797
Licensed Creative Commons Attribution on May 19, 2012

Slide by Bill Ferriter
The Tempered Radical
bit.ly/temperedradical