The importance of feedback in teaching

6. Make feedback two-way
Feedback should be a two-way street. As essential and impactful as giving feedback is, you should also routinely ask for feedback from people. Not just because doing so can improve performance by 4.6 times, but because when you seek feedback on your learning material you learn how to improve your content.
Feedback-informed content is more personalized - it more effectively addresses peoples’ actual knowledge gaps than taking a stab in the dark and creating content around what you think they might need to know.
That’s why we created a Surveys feature in eduMe.
The takeaway...
Empowering your people with ongoing, real-time feedback motivates them, improves performance and encourages self-autonomy in learning. 
By delivering instant feedback, you make sure the gap between a learner’s current level of knowledge, and the level of knowledge you would like them to attain is more successfully and easily bridged.

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   Effective ways of giving feedback to students
   

Feedback is one of the best ways to help students learn. Even if you’re a veteran teacher, you might be looking for ways to make your feedback more effective. There are ways to do this for students of all ages, no matter what subject you teach. You can use a lot of the same techniques for both verbal and written feedback. For example, it should always be timely and constructive. You can tailor your feedback to help students achieve their goals, which will make you an even better educator!
Return assignments promptly so that students can implement feedback. Give students their graded assignments as soon as you can compose your feedback. This will ensure that the assignment is still fresh in their mind. Prompt feedback is likely to make more of an impact than feedback that is submitted long after the assignment was due.
How quickly you can provide feedback will vary on the assignment and how many students you have. For short assignments, try to provide feedback in a day or 2. If it is a longer paper, a week is considered appropriate.
If you have a large class, start grading early and break your grading into pieces. Don’t try to sit down and grade 70 papers at once! You’ll likely lose your concentration (or patience) and your feedback won’t be as effective. Start working on grading right after you get your students’ assignments, but only do a little at a time.
Return assignments promptly so that students can implement feedback. Give students their graded assignments as soon as you can compose your feedback. This will ensure that the assignment is still fresh in their mind. Prompt feedback is likely to make more of an impact than feedback that is submitted long after the assignment was due.
How quickly you can provide feedback will vary on the assignment and how many students you have. For short assignments, try to provide feedback in a day or 2. If it is a longer paper, a week is considered appropriate.
If you have a large class, start grading early and break your grading into pieces. Don’t try to sit down and grade 70 papers at once! You’ll likely lose your concentration (or patience) and your feedback won’t be as effective. Start working on grading right after you get your students’ assignments, but only do a little at a time.
Offer some praise or encouragement at the beginning of your feedback. If you start on a negative note, students might get discouraged and not finish reading your comments. Also, find something positive about the student’s work to help make your feedback sound constructive.

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  You could write, "This is a real improvement from your last test! I can tell you spent a lot of time reviewing the information."
  
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  Try something like, "The example about your grandmother in the introduction really personalizes your story. Great job!"
  

Write feedback that is clear and to the point. Instead of writing several sentences, try using bullet points and write no more than 1 or 2 sentences per point. Students might find that style easier to understand. Try writing points like:
"Great example in your introduction."
"Make sure thesis is in intro., not later in the paper."
Start by talking about the origins of the Civil War in your first paragraph."
"Use more than 1 example to illustrate your point."
"Good improvement from last assignment."
Write feedback that is clear and to the point. Instead of writing several sentences, try using bullet points and write no more than 1 or 2 sentences per point. Students might find that style easier to understand. Try writing points like:[4]
"Great example in your introduction."
"Make sure thesis is in intro., not later in the paper."
Start by talking about the origins of the Civil War in your first paragraph."
"Use more than 1 example to illustrate your point."
"Good improvement from last assignment."
Feedback is an information, advise, praise or evaluation given to a student, by the teacher, about his or her performance for his learning outcomes. It helps the student to enhance his performance and achievement.
Giving proper feedback to a student is one of the greatest challenges that you, as a teacher may face. In fact, effective feedback can double the effect of classroom input on a student’s achievement. Therefore, it is an important part of good teaching.
Some of the effective feedback for learning are listed below:
1) Establish a Respectful Learning Environment
Every individual in the classroom should be respected and treated with dignity and civility irrespective of their class, race, mental or physical abilities. You should ensure that a student never feels offended while giving the feedback; as, such comments may negatively impact the students.
2) Feedback should be given soon after the Learning
If you wait for a long period to give a feedback, then, the moment would be lost and the student may not get a relation for the feedback and the action. So, try to deliver the feedback on time.
3) Ask these 4 Questions
Student psychology says that, every learner will always be keen to know about where he stands with regard to the work he did. So, you can ask these 4 questions before giving the feedback:
What are the capabilities of the student?
What are his/her weaknesses?
How good or bad is the student’s work when compared with others?
What are the effective ways for him/her to improve?
4) Use a Notebook to keep a track of the Student’s Progress:
Jotting down comments on a daily or a weekly basis will help you to analyze about the student’s learning process. This may include a record of the good questions one has asked, his behavioral issues, areas of improvement, test scores etc.
5) Maintain the 3C’s of giving an Effective Feedback
Using the concept of 3C’s will help the student to take the comments positively. The 3C’s are:
Compliment
Correct
Compliment
That is, every time you give a feedback, it should be followed and preceded by a compliment; which will enable the student to take everything positively.
6) Feedback should be Descriptive rather than Evaluative
Giving a detailed explanation of what the student has done rightly and wrongly is one of the most effective ways of rendering a feedback for learning. It would be more productive if you focus more on the rights and then analyze it by citing examples.
7) Be Sensitive to the Individual needs of the Student
A classroom is a group of diverse students. Every student may have different attitudes of mind. So, individual attention should be given to each student while giving feedback. Try to maintain a balance between providing proper encouragement and wanting not to hurt the individual feeling of the student.
8) Feedback must be given by referring to a Skill or an Ability:
Pointing out the right skills of a student will provide him more confidence in using his abilities. Apart from pointing the skills, you can also compliment for a performance, which may give him a kind of self-realization of his works.
9) Host a one-to-one Conference:
An optimistic one-to-one feedback session will draw student’s attention as well as, will give him an opportunity to clear his queries without hesitation. As this strategy requires time management, you will have to ensure that the other students are busy with their work while you meet the student.
10) Allow the Students to take Notes
While in a meeting with a student, inculcate the ‘habit of making notes’ as it will help him recollect his right and wrong responses respectively.
11) Distribute the Answer Sheets or Comment Cards at the Beginning of the Session
You can give out the corrected sheets or the comment cards at the beginning of the class. It will let the students to clear their doubts during the class hour itself, which will make a platform for the relevant discussion of the queries.
12) Provide a Model or an Example
While giving feedback about the do’s and don’ts , you better try to explain it by citing an example of how an A+ paper looks like when compared to a C+ paper which will help the student to understand more about the insufficiency in his answer paper.
13) Invite Students to Give Feedback
This strategy will be useful to you as well as your students, as the students will get an opportunity to express their views about the class and you will learn few things about yourself.
14) Give Genuine Praise
In order to encourage the students, never give them pseudo-praises, rather give them genuine praises, that too only when they really deserve it. If you give a “Good” or “Keep it up” on all his works, then after a period of time, it will become meaningless to him. So, you can try to offer genuine praises.
15) Use Phrases like “I noticed”
Making use of phrases like ‘I noticed…’ have multiple benefits on the students, as it will make the student aware of the fact that he is being noticed by you, which will not make him lethargic for his tasks. Thus, acknowledging a student’s effort will positively influence his academic performance.
16) Ask Another Adult to Give Feedback
Inviting a ‘guest’ or ‘another adult’ to grade the students will increase the quality of the work of a student. This will encourage the students as they will get an external hand of appreciation.
17) Use Post-It Notes:
Many students feel humiliated when commented publicly, this can be resorted by using ‘post-it notes’, where you can write a comment on his note book, rather than telling it aloud. This is really effective for students who are short-tempered.
18) Use Different Forms of Feedback:
Verbal, non-verbal or written forms are different ways of giving a feedback. Apart from telling the feedback aloud or writing in notebooks, you can use gestures and facial expressions like ‘frowns’ or ‘thumb ups’ as means of appreciation.
19) Focus on One of the Required Skills:
This can be explained with an example, for instance; if you tell the students, that for the next day’s exam, you are going to focus only on the ‘grammar’ part, then it would be easier for the students to learn it. This strategy will not give a steady growth, but a gradual improvement can be traced in students, without any burden for them.
20) Fix Due Dates for Students:
In this strategy, you can club the students, and assign a day for a meet. Rotational charts can be used so that the student will also know about his turn to meet you, thereby using the time fruitfully to discuss doubts.
21) Encourage Self-Feedback:
You can give opportunities to the students to evaluate themselves, i.e., give them a space to correct their own worksheets and rate themselves. This will help them to analyze their self. This strategy can only be done with older students.
22) Give a Tangible and Transparent feedback:
To make the student more attentive while giving a feedback you can make use of simple and understandable words. Avoid beating about the bush, which may drag the student’s attention.
23) Never Postpone the Feedback Session
To make the feedback more effective, you should be consistent about it. Allot a particular time in the class for feedbacks, rather than using the age-old cliché dialogues of a teacher that “Since we are running out of time, we’ll discuss it later”.
24) Try to be a Friendly Teacher
No matter how strict you are in class, be friendly during the feedback session, so that the student may not have a sense of aversion to you.
The greatest difficulty that the teacher may face while giving a feedback is the arrogance of her students.
Feedback should be user-friendly (specific and personalised), transparent, addressable, timely, ongoing, and content-rich. It also needs to be clear, purposeful, and compatible with students’ existing knowledge, while providing little threat to self-esteem.
The best kinds of feedback:
• are goal-referenced: linked to, and assisting understanding of, the goals of learning
• are matched to the needs of the students, with the level of support they need
• are accurate and trustworthy (with teachers and students in agreement about what counts as success)
• are carefully timed: provided when students need it to improve learning (which might be during the learning activity, or before revising a piece of work)
• focus on strengths and weaknesses as well as revealing what students understand and misunderstand, and accompanied with strategies to help the student improve
• emphasise correct rather than incorrect responses
• focus on changes from previous work or understanding
• guide ongoing learning
• are directed towards enhanced self-efficacy and more effective self-regulation
• are two-way conversations (either written dialogue or oral) rather than one-way
• are used in conjunction with self and/or peer assessment
• do not threaten self-esteem
• are checked for clarity, adequacy and effectiveness with the student — “Does this feedback help?”
• are actionable — with the student given time to respond to and act on feedback.
Three stages to effective feedback
1. Feed-up: Before feedback can be given, students need to know the learning intention(s). Feed-up clarifies for the student Where am I going? What are the goals? This information sets the context for feedback.
2. Feedback: Feedback itself focuses on monitoring and assessing learning progression in relation to the learning intention or task. It is about How am I doing? What progress is being made towards the goals?
3. Feed-forward: This relates to the next steps required for improvement on a specific task or learning intention. It is about Where to next? What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress? Here the answer is likely to be directed to the refinement of goals, and seeking more challenging goals, because these are most likely to lead to greater achievement.
Effective feedback is when teachers and students address all three of these questions.

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