‘Formative assessment, refers to any activities undertaken by teachers – and by students themselves – that provide feedback, which are then used to adapt teaching methods to meet student needs and improve learning outcomes.’ (Black and Wiliam, 1998).
Feedback can be a contentious issue – the use of formative and summative assessment, marking and workload, and the value of data as a tool to improve learner outcomes. Dylan Wiliam addresses this issue by clearly emphasising the importance of effectively providing feedback to move learners forward.
After 33 years of teaching, following many different trains of thought, always amending my approach and trying earnestly to keep myself ahead of the game, I have found myself curiously captivated by what really is good feedback? By feedback, I mean something that resonates with the pupils, gives them something tangible that can actually provide them with a tool they can use to help them move forward with their thinking and learning and actually help to make a difference for them to improve their performance. We aren’t talking ‘spoon feeding’ here, or copy-cat techniques – simply a way of getting the learners to grapple with their own understanding, make their own improvements and progress to satisfying levels they truly own!
So how can this be done, simply and effectively, bear in mind as teachers we need to keep our own well-being and workload quenched and satisfied? How can we provide effective feedback that really moves the learners forward?
What is effective feedback?
Tom Sherrington has captured Wiliam’s message beautifully in his article: ‘Giving feedback as Actions’ (Sherrington, 2017). He explains, significant feedback impact needs to lead to improved outcomes for pupils and be less in terms of a review of their work and more in terms of very specific actions that students should take to move forward.
I have found that a powerful way to embark on any piece of new learning, is to firstly clarify what the learners already know. Using Sherrington’s principle of Re-learn and Re-test in a writing lesson with my class of Year 5s, I found that an effective method was to allow the pupils to analyse a given example. Not only did this provide them with a flavour of what a good, finished article could look like, but enabled them to recap their own learning by unpicking previously learnt skills from the extract, and deepen their understanding. A simple strategy, yet effective in grasping their engagement by allowing them to really understand how to use these skills well and apply them successfully.
In this example, the class were asked to refer to their Mastery Keys (learnt skills) and analyse an example piece of hybrid text (information and biography) about Ken Nedimyer and his fascination of coral reefs from ‘The Brilliant Deep’. Here, the pupil has successfully unpicked the skills through paired discussion and annotation before moving on to use these skills in their own independent piece of writing, having already done all the hard work – reading, discussing, recapping, annotating and drawing up a success criteria. I had designed a recap lesson which relied heavily on class participation from the onset, allowing me to focus carefully on supporting where needed and having a clear understanding of the pupils’ ability – empowering myself with a concise formative assessment of the learning before moving on. Likewise, the pupils eagerly took ownership of their work by re-learning and re-testing their skills allowing clarity in what the expectations are for creating their own successful piece of writing.
In the following lesson, after completing their own independent writing, the pupils were then asked to reflect and respond to their own work through self-assessment. Here, the pupil has picked out the Mastery Keys that they have included from their drawn-up success criteria. This process allowed them time to read their work again, correct any errors, edit anything they felt might improve their work, as well as proving they have a thorough understanding of the previously learnt and re-capped skills.
After this, the principle of feedback Re-draft or Re-do can be actioned if the learning intention of the lesson is clear so that specific marking can be meaningful and focussed (by the teacher, self or peer). The pupils can focus upon and improve that single criteria (objective) by being asked to:
- Redraft/ re-do this piece of work by doing X, by adding Y, by correcting Z…
- Re-do this piece of work but this time make sure you include X, you measure Y, you state Z correctly….
Raising awareness of these areas to improve by using codes and highlighters can significantly address teacher workload, as well as enabling the pupils to understand their learning and how they can move on to improve their work.
Re-drafting/ re-doing can be very powerful provided that the actions to improve are specific and the scale of the task is manageable for both teacher and student.
In these examples, teacher feedback is minimal in written form. However, discussions will have taken place throughout the lesson, and whole class feedback allows specific areas to be targeted by recapping. Frequent formative assessment enables the teacher to know which steps are needed for the pupils next to move the learning on successfully.
Positive impact of effective feedback
The intended outcome of using formative assessment strategies such as meaningful feedback to move the learning on successfully leading to overall improved pupil outcomes in engagement, cognition, learning behaviour and attainment are:
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The most important resource we have is our wonderful teaching staff who work incredibly hard to facilitate quality learning across the school. It is of paramount importance to support them in the best way we can by ensuring we have realistic expectations of workload enabling them to have a healthy work/ life balance. The MAT we belong to conducted a survey recently which asked specifically about workload. The response shows that overall, staff in our school are happy about decisions that have been made to address workload.
Marking and feedback had previously been an area which we deemed necessary to address. By asking questions such as: So, what? Who is the marking for? What are you expecting from that? allowed us to be brave and reconsider the purpose of marking. Hence, we embarked on the journey of embedding formative assessment, addressing how we can get the best from our learners to enable them to make excellent progress and allow teachers to have a firm grip what their ability actually is, without wasting time on purposeless exercises.
Next steps
Having established the principles and effectiveness of quality feedback through formative assessment, the future for our young learners has endless possibilities for them taking control and moving their learning forward. They are proving to be excellent sources of support for one another, which conveniently allows us to explore strategies and embark our next focus area of the Embedding Formative Assessment programme: activating students as instructional resources for one another.
Suzanne Corr (August 2024)
Assistant Headteacher, St Joseph’s Primary School, HFCMAT
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