My article on feedback is the lead article in this month’s Educational Leadership. I provide a clear definition of what feedback is and (especially) what it ISN’T. Feedback is not advice (e.g. Use more detail!), nor is it evaluation (e.g. Good job!) even though many people write and talk as if it were. This conflation is unfortunate. Pure feedback is the key to SELF-Improvement. Feedback is descriptive information on what happened, given a goal – actionable effects/results/data that I can use to improve.
You can read the article online here.
I received a lovely email in reply to the article, and I excerpt it below:
As I re-read your article from the perspective of a classroom teacher who has only ever provided ineffective feedback, I was left with the grapple of how to more consistently elevate my feedback. I am imagining adding a last section called “What If We Could Easily Make Time?” to follow your last section “But There’s No Time”…that we will write together as a discussion group. I am unsure if it will match the caliber of your expertise, but I am sure that leaving our readers with a few words of possible and positive next steps (I believe) will increase the likelihood of my teachers actually implementing your words.
I imagine a few of these bullets surfacing as tangible steps during the “What if We Could Easily Make Time” discussion:
- What if I asked my kids to consistently take a look at their finished products before handing them in, and asked them to write down one thing they think they did with quality and one thing they think they could add or do differently to make their work even higher quality?
- What if I asked my kids to swap their finished product with another student to invite their feedback on what is done well and what could be done even better?
- What if I invited my kids to go ahead and implement their own feedback, or their peers’ feedback, before turning in their products for “grading”?
- What if I asked my kids more often what their goal is for, say, their group work time today (instead of just turning them loose)?
- What if I asked the groups to write their goal down?
- What if I paused the class after maybe 10 minutes and asked each group to take a look back at their goal and to identify one thing that is going well and one thing they could do better to help them meet their written goal?
- What if I asked my kids on a Monday morning, for example, to write down one goal they have in mind for the week ahead?
- What if I asked my kids on Friday to think back over the week and self-evaluate how they did in taking their goal seriously?
- What if I noticed decisions that kids made that were helpful for their meeting a goal, and to write down my observation on a sticky note in the moment for them to have as evidence on their “goal form”?
As a coach, I am thrilled by the possibility of just one teacher daring to pursue just one of the “what ifs”…
What a great follow-up! Thanks, Diane!
PS: A number of people asked for more examples than were in the article. ASCD editors chopped my original in half for space reasons. So you can have the original longer article, with more examples and explanations; and some Powerpoint slides with examples here: Feedback Wiggins FINAL DRAFT 2012 Feedback Overview.pptx
9 Responses
Grant’s aricle is so beautifully written and clearly articulated, it is a must-keep for anyone who wants to provide feedback. Of particular value, I think, is the message that we stay focused on information about the degree to which students’/colleagues’/our own goals are met.
In STEM education, we can see this very clearly because we often engage students in engineering projects. A well-conceived engineering project has a clear set of performance goals for whatever it is that students are designing, and their designs are tested against these criteria. Students receive feedback from the real world about the performance of their ideas, and that creates a natural opportunity for a teacher to become the coach and facilitator, rather than coach/facilitator/evaluator. Other educators in other fields have created structures for this kind of feedback, but it is my hope that with a little more engineering in their lives, students and teachers alike will be able to use the engineering model as a template for asking about where they might naturally find evidence of how their performances are going; that a student aiming to write a humorous essay might think to ask for relevant evidence, such as, “When, if at all, did you find yourself smiling, chuckling, hooting with laughter? When did the tone seem serious?”
In addition, I agree in particular with Diane’s third bullet. It’s important to build in opportunities to do something with feedback. Again, there’s a model for this in well-conceived engineering lessons, because redesign (after testing and evaluating an engineered “item”) is built into the engineering process. It seems to me that this is not only important for learning processes and content, but also for remaining engaged in learning. Also, on a side note, as a writer, I know I depend on this kind of opportunity to use feedback to vet my work and revise it before I send it to my editor, and, likewise, to work with an editor before my work is published (except when I comment on blogs, unfortunately).
[…] recent issue of Educational Leadership. To learn about what feedback is (and isn’t), click HERE. This entry was posted in Uncategorized by Kristen Swanson. Bookmark the […]
Your article hit at the heart of what many years of observing and teaching teachers has revealed to me. Feedback often lands on the top of kids’ heads! It never actually reaches their minds so they can do something with it. Teachers are frequently distractedd by what is going on with the rest of the class when they offer feedback to a young learner and that is understandable…but, their feedback was interrupted and ineffective.
Delivery of feedback is my main issue. Consider how we go to great lengths to offer proper feedback to young pets in order to bond with them, train them, and establish boudaries and rapport with them. We use VOICE, PACE, BODY LANGUAGE, and EYE CONTACT. It is the same when effective and useful feedback is delivered to kids. The more skilled we are at not only considering WHAT we say, but HOW we say it, the more impact our feedback will have….and isn’t that what it’s for? Immediate, productve, sustainable impact?
Find more details on how to deliver feedback most effectively in my first book, Catch a Falling Reader.
Thanks for opening this critical topic up, Grant. Your wisdom is enlightening, and very much needed.
Grant,
Enjoyed the last two posts including this one on feedback. I have been observing coaches up here at the college, this fall the men’s soccer coach and his staff. It’s interesting, though not surprising, how non-athlete centered so many coaches are (as so many teachers are non student centered in their classrooms). What I hear a lot from especially the head coach is what I would call “autocratic advice” as opposed to real feedback. Example:
The three central midfielders (in a triangular shape) are having trouble combining with each other in an effort to develop an attacking rhythm to get forward on the attack. The coach yells out, “you’re too close together, you need better spacing!” A different approach might be, to stop the play, and ask the players, “why are we having trouble combining?”, or, “what adjustments might you make to make it easier for you to combine so we can get forward as a team?”, or, if a lack of good spacing is making it too crowded for us to connect with each other, where might the two of you move when your colleague has the ball?” The opportunity for self-assessment and players’ offering feedback to themselves individually and to each other as teammates in a variety of different contexts in the midfield is a healthy and in my mind desirable athlete centered approach to coaches giving feedback (assuming players understand the goals in the first place). After listening to the players and indeed observing the adjustments they make, then the coach can indeed offer feedback of his own.
Coaches, like teachers, however, tend to be impatient and are concerned about lack of time to “cover” the content of the practice, and so the Socratic part of the feedback process usually ends up being short-circuited. That has certainly been the case is what I have observed so far. The coach has told me he’s “old school.” As far as the feedback question is concerned, I really wonder how “old school” he really is.
best, Bob
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[For readers who may not know, Bob is the best coach I ever saw, my former colleague when teaching.]
I agree, Bob – impatience is the root failure in so many teaching ills. Whether it is ‘coverage’ of content in class, failure ot use wait time after asking a question, or autocratic guidance on the field, everyone is in a thoughtless hurry. I have often thought that the key ability to be taught in ed. school is – learning when NOT to teach.My favorite line on this, from Robert Hutchins of U of Chicago Great Book fame: you can identify a great teacher by the number of important things they decline to teach.
Thank you for this. I enjoyed the original article and I have shared the “what if” reflective questions with our faculty.
The hope is that they will implement some of these questions this week in class. The other hope is that they will share how it worked in our faculty discussion forum on Moodle.
It is blogs and articles like yours that challenge us to go beyond the status quo.
[…] Then, on his blog ‘Granted, but…‘, Wiggins writes more on this subject and includes some tangible steps to providing and developing effective feedback, that teachers might use with their students, as well as links for his final draft for the EL article and a PowerPoint, which provide fuller thinking on the topic. Find that ‘On Feedback’ blog post here. […]
[…] article was originally published on Grant’s blog. Grant can be found on twitter here; image attribution flickr user josekevo; You Probably […]
[…] if you’re on service with me right now, get ready. Tomorrow’s “What if?” involves me asking for your learning goal for the rest of the […]