Effective feedback follows instruction. When student work does not demonstrate at least partial understanding of a concept or process, feedback is not usually effective and the problems are best addressed through further teaching. Hattie & Timperley state that:

A simple clue that a student’s work is not ready for feedback is that you can’t find any legitimate success feedback to offer. When the work doesn’t demonstrate any understanding, don’t give feedback - reteach instead.

To combine feedback and instruction, teachers should:

• select and sequence the learning experiences (instruction) and integrate with opportunities to gather information about the learning (assessment)
• intentionally design assessments to occur at ‘checkpoints’ (that is, critical points during the learning where teachers and students engage in assessment to determine who is learning and who needs additional or alternative instruction prior to moving forward with the learning)
• provide opportunities for feedback from the teacher, from peers, and from themselves (through self-assessment)
• encourage students to use the feedback to take further action to learn and improve.

Recording patterns of behaviour

Fisher and Frey believe teachers should identify patterns in student errors so they can target instruction or intervention on specific areas of student need. They suggest keeping a table to record student error patterns.

For example, list errors in the first column, and note down the initials of students that made the error in the second column. Note: each set of initials in the second column represents a student who made an error.

The information available from this pattern analysis:

• all but one student demonstrated mastery of skimming and scanning
• a fair number of students did not engage in sourcing - and could need re-teaching
• in terms of drawing conclusions, it would be useful to re-teach the whole class.

By looking for patterns of errors, additional teaching can be designed for the whole class, small groups or individuals to address errors.

Effective feedback directs attention to the intended learning and/or success criteria, pointing out strengths and offering specific information to guide improvement (Stiggins, Arter, Chappius, & Chappuis).

Whatever the form of the feedback, it needs to be explicit about the learning intention and success criteria.

Be explicit about the learning intention and success criteria

1. Ensure students know and understand the learning intention and success criteria
2. Limit feedback to these
3. Attend to surface features every now and again.

Ensure you do not:

• always focus on the elements of - presentation, quantity, surface features (such as spelling and
  punctuation) and effort at the expense of the learning intention and success criteria
• do not write/ talk about anything that is not related to the success criteria that you told students
  about at the beginning of the task.

Prioritise feedback

1. Address the most important needs first
2. Limit feedback to 2-3 specific recommendations linked to the learning goal/s
3. adjust feedback based on individual students’ readiness and learning preferences. An
   appropriate amount of feedback for one student might not be enough for another, and might
   overwhelm a third.

Ensure you do not ‘blanket mark’ (mark every error) or expect students to apply all the criteria that they have ever been taught for every task.

Focus on key feedback questions

1. Ensure feedback focuses on 'What are the goal/s?'
2. Ensure feedback focuses on 'What progress is being made toward the goal/s?'
3. Ensure feedback focuses on 'What needs to be undertaken to make better progress?'

Try not to mark errors without making improvement suggestions.

Provide ‘closing the gap’ feedback prompts

1. Provide reminder prompts based on student needs.
2. Provide scaffolded prompts based on student needs.
3. Provide example prompts based on student needs.

Try not to write too much as too much information can be overwhelming and difficult for a student to take in.

Check the adequacy of the feedback

1. Ask the student what support they need.
2. Ask the student directly:
   • Is that enough or do you need an example?
   • Do you know what to do next?
   • Is that enough help?
   • What will you do if you get stuck again?
3. Ask the student to tell you what they think you are trying to say to them.

Ensure you don't assume that students understand your comments or know how to implement the feedback.

Include peer feedback and self-feedback/ reflection

1. Encourage students to question you and each other to deepen their understanding.
2. Model and scaffold the types of questions you want students to use themselves.
3. Provide opportunities for peer and self-feedback prior to the work being submitted.
4. Provide and work through models and exemplars of quality work, based on the learning
   intention and success criteria.

Try not to expect students to engage in peer and self-feedback without providing instruction and
guidance.

Intervene as soon as possible

1. Give the most effective form of feedback in the most timely way.
2. Offer feedback during learning as well as at the end of a task/ assignment.
3. Check-in with students as they engage in a task.
4. Formalise ‘check-ins’ - allocate times for ‘check-ins’ during learning.
5. Engage in a feedback cycle > feedback > action > feedback > action and so on
6. Limit marking and focus on one or two areas for improvement so that feedback can be provided sooner rather than later.

Ensure you don't wait until the end of a task or assignment to offer feedback or leave too much time before offering feedback.

Vince Lombardi, a famous American football coach, once stated: Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent. Only perfect practice makes perfect.

Feedback needs to be acted upon by the student. Providing too much feedback doesn’t deepen the learning if the student doesn't need to think or do anything for themselves.

Much of the feedback offered to students can be less about improvement and more about corrections of mistakes the teacher has spotted. Comments and questions - such as 'You’ve missed something here.' or 'What should you have put there?' or 'What about these?' - require students to do very little thinking about the learning process.

Instead, pose more open questions to stimulate student thinking:

• 'Is there anything you could change to make that a proper sentence?'
• 'Read through this sentence and tell me what you think would make the sentence more descriptive.'

In addition, try to avoid correcting or annotating errors for the student - instead state or write comments that the student can understand and act upon.

Allow time to enact feedback

To demonstrate the importance of feedback, allocate time for feedback to be acted on. Since all feedback requires action, if the teacher wants students to take the feedback on-board, they need to provide the time to do this.

To support this process, teachers need to:

1. Allow time, opportunity and support for students to act on the information they receive
   about their learning.
2. Set up routines so feedback can be enacted, for example:
   • read the comments
   • clarify the comments
   • act on the comments
   • seek peer feedback
   • re-submit work.
3. Break longer tasks into stages and provide feedback which is essential to the successful navigation of subsequent stages.
4. Expect to see changes/ improvements as a result of feedback.

Ultimately, the only effective feedback is that which is acted upon. This means feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor.

• Clarke, S (2003). Enriching Feedback in the primary classroom. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
• Chappuis, J (2012, September). Leadership for Learning: How am I doing? Educational Leadership, 70(1).
• Fisher, D. & Frey, N (2012). Making time for feedback. Educational Leadership, 70 (1).
• Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The Power of Feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1).
• Stiggins, R. J., Arter, J. A., Chappuis, S., & Chappuis, S. (2004). Classroom Assessment for Student Learning: Doing it right - Using it well. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.