Delving deeper into feedback

Dylan Wiliam (www.dylanwiliam.org) speaks of the importance of feedback being more work for the student than the teacher.  This got me thinking about the amount of time I spend writing comments on pupils' work as compared to the seconds they spend ignoring it and looking straight at the grade at the bottom.  So, today I tried a different approach.

I used the same feedback sheet for pupils' essays as always.  This is designed to allow pupils to quickly establish strengths and areas for development.  They then use this (with mixed success) to set targets for the next piece of work.

This time, however, I put pupils into random groups of four.  Each group then received four anonymous feedback sheets (which I numbered for my reference).  In their groups, they had to decide on targets based on my comments only.  They did this without seeing the piece of work.  This meant that there was no 'emotion' involved in the target-setting, as pupils had no idea whose essay this was.

Following on from this, I then gave out each group one of the essays in order to match up with one of the feedback sheets.  This meant they had to scan the essay and discuss its strengths and weaknesses in line with my comments.  I then gave out another, and finally the last two essays to each group.

What I observed was that pupils were much more engaged in the comments I made, and that there was a marked shift away from the culture of just looking for the grade.  Pupils also appeared happier and more confident when setting targets for the next time.  Pupils also needed to have a clearer idea of the criteria for marking the work in order to make the targets more meaningful and clearer for anyone to understand.

This exercise was only slightly more time-consuming for me as the marker (perhaps only a minute longer per pupil), but it did take most of a lesson for the pupils to complete.  I am confident it was worth taking this time.

As a positive side-effect, I also found this process made me really think about how I was phrasing the comments, as pupils were setting targets on an unseen piece of work.  This meant that my comments needed to be perhaps more direct, concise and 'obvious' than they might have been in the past.

All in all, a very successful exercise and one which I will repeat in the future.  Here's hoping that there is a tangible result for the next piece of work!