The Feedback Loop
As the semester draws to a close, I am reflecting on one of the questions that students have asked again and again over the course of the semester:
“Will this be marked?”
Everytime I hear this question, I cringe.
It reminds me of how students (and teachers) have been programmed to seek external validation, and how our motivation for learning is often based on a mark, rather than growth. It also reminds me that the system in which we are working is one that values a teacher’s feedback as the only feedback worth hearing, dismissing student experiences, perspectives and contributions as unworthy of time or attention.
Why do marks and teacher-led lessons continue to permeate our practice? It’s as though we are hanging on for fear of falling into a great abyss where roles become muddied and a teacher’s identity as the “key” to success is called into question.
It’s a little scary, I know. But I want students to learn for growth, not for marks. I also want them to feel like they have contributions to make and that they can reflect on their own work, and the work of their peers. And I have things to learn, too. If we close ourselves off to new opportunities for learning and growing, what are we teaching our students?
So where do we start? How do we change the question from “Will this be marked?” to “How does this help me grow as a learner?”
At the beginning of the semester, I told students I was not going to mark anything for the first month and a half of class. I would provide extensive feedback, but no marks.
I spent those first six weeks in a feedback craze, a truly delirious state, where I was determined to provide as much descriptive feedback as possible on writing tasks.
My students’ question did change, but only slightly:
“When will you be giving us a mark?”
Another issue arose: few students were integrating any of my feedback into their work. And it wasn’t for lack of creativity, either. My attempts at providing feedback were responsive and varied. But it didn’t matter what I tried, few students understood feedback and how to use it.
Feedback is a tough nut to crack. How can we make it meaningful? How can we engage students’ actively in the feedback process? How can we use feedback to foster a growth mindset — to move away from external validation and a fear of failure and towards an internal motivation, curiosity, persistence and perseverance?
I had failed… Or maybe this was another opportunity to reflect on my practice.
I asked students to think about their assignments. I talked about what it meant to integrate feedback into their work. But they had no idea what “feedback” meant, or that they could play an active role in the feedback process.
I should have started the semester by teaching students about feedback and then have moved on to involving them in the process of giving feedback.”
If students are not engaged in the feedback process — in assessing their strengths and challenges, in coming up with strategies to improve their work, in applying these strategies and assessing the results of their efforts, in reflecting back on the process and how to transfer skills and apply them to their next assignment — then feedback is meaningless…which means I (and many, many others) have spent hours and hours giving feedback for no gain.
How, as teachers, do we make the metacognitive explicit? How do we help students to think about their thinking and learning, and take initiatives to make changes based on this knowledge?
The Feedback Protocol
I began discussing the problem with some colleagues (Amanda Potts, Canterbury HS, and Kristin Douglas, Adult High School) and tracked down a powerpoint called “The Feedback Protocol” that I had been introduced to two years ago at Longfields Davidson Secondary School. The feedback protocol is a writing workshop where students are placed into mixed level groupings and invited to give and receive feedback on a piece of writing. The workshop was developed by Peggy Silva, Souhegan High School, Amherst, New Hampshire, and was brought to Ottawa by Kristin Douglas (Adult High School), Andrea Zuck (Longfields Davidson S.S.) and Cathy MacKechnie (Longfields Davidson S.S.) who adapted the workshop for different English and science classes.
The protocol provides specific instructions on how to engage in a peer editing process so that all students can participate and improve their work. A script is provided to students, as well as instructions about the kind of feedback they can provide, and on how to give it. The protocol can be adapted to focus on skills or concepts that have been taught prior to the protocol so that students have an understanding of what to look for and comment on, such as on the more concrete aspects of writing (such as transition words) or the more abstract (developing ideas). You can also provide students with sentence starters for feedback so that all levels of students can speak. Therefore the protocol not only engages students in peer editing, but also in self-evaluation, the writing process, the integration of feedback, and academic speaking and listening.
And…it is *pure* magic. Students see other students’ work and engage in assessing their own, based on what they see. The self-assessment and peer-assessment combination are opportunities for students to understand a task more deeply and discover new learning outcomes that, as teachers, we may not even have thought to assess!
Think about how the marking process seems to speed up after you have marked a dozen or so assignments. The more responses you mark, the clearer you understand your own criteria for a “good” response. The same goes for students. Providing students with the opportunity to be exposed to their peers’ work allows them to not only understand the criteria for a “good” response, but to contribute to it. The result is a deeper understanding of expectations, collaborative rubrics, and a thorough understanding of their own strengths and challenges as writers.
This protocol was a game-changer in my English class. Students were engaging in the process of assessment AND growing as writers!
The next assignment they submitted did get a mark (and it was a better mark), but when asked to reflect on the protocol, few mentioned marks.
They reflected on how reading their work aloud to other group members helped them to catch mistakes in their writing. How they never realized that you had to indent a paragraph until they saw their peers had done so. They wrote about how they saw the structure of a paragraph for the first time. They could identify a good supporting detail because they had analyzed their supporting points and compared them to their peers’. They used words like “structure”, “format”, and “flow.”
They also began charting their progress using a graphic organizer so that they could track their developments as writers.
*PURE* magic.
It’s June 24th and the semester is drawing to a close, and I’m thinking about my own learning over the course of the semester. The thing about feedback is that it’s not just something students need to understand and integrate. It’s something that we also need to be open to, and involved in. The feedback loop is two-way street. It involves both teachers and students. It might not be easy. Or fun. And it might muddy the roles of teacher and student. But it is necessary for our own growth and for the growth of our students.
