Giving feedback

GIVING FEEDBACK
By their very nature, lesson planning and classroom management are never “finished.” They both require constant iteration to improve over time. But how do teachers know what to improve – or that improvement is needed at all?
They might look at student performance on assessments to see how well learners absorbed new information. They might scan the faces of students during a lesson to see if anyone’s drifting off. They might gather question cards at the end of a lesson to see where there are gaps in understanding. All of these are examples of gathering feedback.
In a sense, feedback is learning. We interact with the world through feedback from our senses. We test ideas through feedback from hypotheses and experimentation. We adjust our future behavior through feedback from past experience.
Students learn by interacting with new knowledge, using new skills and receiving ongoing direction from teachers, parents and peers about how they’re progressing. Teachers also use feedback – from students, from teachers, administrators, other staff and even self-reflection – to suss out what lessons they need to reinforce, what teaching techniques are falling flat and the professional skills they can further develop.
Below, we’ll take a look at how feedback works in lesson planning, as well as best practices teachers can use to give better feedback to students and how administrators can give better feedback to teachers.
Using feedback loops in lesson planning
To understand how feedback creates better learning experiences for students, it helps to think about lesson planning as a continuous loop with a measurable output that teachers can then use as an input in the next cycle.
Loops like this are common in companies that take customer complaints and turn them into product improvements, or even when we use fitness apps that measure physical activity to track progress toward goals like running a 5k.
Similarly, in lesson planning, teachers identify goals upfront, defining what students will learn or be able to do by the end of the class. A feedback loop is a great tool for evaluating whether that goal was achieved – or whether there’s still work to be done – and then reevaluating the process so it works better next time.
The feedback loop consists of five parts:
If the goal is the “what,” then the plan is the “how” – the feedback the teacher will use to assess progress toward their goal. In chapter 1, we describe seven sections of a good lesson plan, including ways in which teachers can use assessments to check for student understanding. For example, teachers may decide to use quizzes, in-class assignments or group presentations to assess their students’ progress.
Collect data
Once teachers identify what kinds of feedback they need, they can begin collecting data. Note that not all data is created equal – to be helpful in a feedback loop, it should be both observable and quantifiable. Technology can help with this process, whether it’s quizzes administered electronically or an education management platform that unites data from several assessments into one place.
Analyze data
Once the results are in, teachers can look for patterns that emerge. They may find, for example, that students are particularly strong in one area but need more support in another by looking at their class’ assessment results as a whole. Or they may notice from tracking actual time allocation that the class often spends more time than anticipated answering student questions.