Last week, I gave ungraded comments on my children’s literature students’ first book review. I called it feedback, but as I worked through them, I caught myself many times wanting to write, “Great,” “Good job here,” or something similarly laudatory but so vague that it wasn’t helpful. To a novice reviewer, those comments just aren’t specific enough. I was looking at a single paragraph – it was great compared to what? Good job compared to what? I realized I wasn’t giving very helpful feedback and consciously tried to change those plaudits to something more specific: “Excellent tone that reflects professional stance and not personal opinion.”
A few days later, I got an ASCD email with a few articles focusing on feedback. Grant Wiggins’ article, in particular, caught my attention (and, again, caught me red-handed – emphasis mine):
Information becomes feedback if, and only if, I am trying to cause something and the information tells me whether I am on track or need to change course …
Note that in everyday situations, goals are often implicit, although fairly obvious to everyone … But in school, learners are often unclear about the specific goal of a task or lesson, so it is crucial to remind them about the goal and the criteria by which they should self-assess. For example, a teacher might say,
- The point of this writing task is for you to make readers laugh. So, when rereading your draft or getting feedback from peers, ask, How funny is this? Where might it be funnier?
- As you prepare a table poster to display the findings of your science project, remember that the aim is to interest people in your work as well as to describe the facts you discovered through your experiment. Self-assess your work against those two criteria using these rubrics. The science fair judges will do likewise…
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Effective feedback is concrete, specific, and useful; it provides actionable information. Thus, “Good job!” and “You did that wrong” and B+ are not feedback at all. We can easily imagine the learners asking themselves in response to these comments, What specifically should I do more or less of next time, based on this information? No idea. They don’t know what was “good” or “wrong” about what they did.
Actionable feedback must also be accepted by the performer. Many so-called feedback situations lead to arguments because the givers are not sufficiently descriptive; they jump to an inference from the data instead of simply presenting the data. For example, a supervisor may make the unfortunate but common mistake of stating that “many students were bored in class.” That’s a judgment, not an observation. It would have been far more useful and less debatable had the supervisor said something like, “I counted ongoing inattentive behaviors in 12 of the 25 students once the lecture was underway. The behaviors included texting under desks, passing notes, and making eye contact with other students. However, after the small-group exercise began, I saw such behavior in only one student.”
Such care in offering neutral, goal-related facts is the whole point of the clinical supervision of teaching and of good coaching more generally. Effective supervisors and coaches work hard to carefully observe and comment on what they observed, based on a clear statement of goals. That’s why I always ask when visiting a class, “What would you like me to look for and perhaps count?” In my experience as a teacher of teachers, I have always found such pure feedback to be accepted and welcomed. Effective coaches also know that in complex performance situations, actionable feedback about what went right is as important as feedback about what didn’t work.
Important stuff for us all to think about as we continue to grow our students — and our own practice.
