More tips from Dylan Wiliam
Video transcript
dylan let’s dive straight in what’s your first tip for us today my first tip relates to feedback and there’s a lot of stuff that teachers have told about feedback that really isn’t supported by the research and there’s a really important review by two american researchers kluger and denise and everybody cites this research but hardly anybody reads what these two guys said on the last page of their paper which is a very very dense paper they did a meta-analysis of the effects of feedback found the average effect size was 0.4 but then they said we don’t think that’s important we don’t think that’s important because the effect size of feedback is irrelevant if you get a high effect size by making the students more dependent on the feedback what they pointed out was that a feedback intervention that makes students need more feedback in the future is actually not very helpful and so what they suggested was rather than looking at the effect size of feedback we should be looking at what the students do with the feedback they pointed out they can change behavior change the goal abandon the goal or reject the feedback and so this was the first paper this is 25 years ago now that really said we should worry less about the kind of feedback and more about what the students do with it and so you know i say to teachers good feedback is feedback that students use and so feedback isn’t getting getting used by the students it’s completely irrelevant and yet still people trying to figure out what the effect size of feedback is when it’s a kind of silly question so recently a lot of people have started looking at what some researchers call recipients processes for putting the effort not into getting the feedback perfect but getting the relationship between the students and the teachers right so the students act on the feedback and so i’ve been working on this for about 10 years now trying to think about how we can make feedback more accessible to students and so you know i do think there’s a case for teachers writing comments on students work i i don’t think it should be the primary form of feedback so i’ve advocated what i call four quarters marking 25 percent detailed feedback 25 percent whole class marking 25 peer assessment 25 self-assessment but i want to focus on that event where the teachers do write comments on students work and we had this crazy thing in england which was called triple marking the teachers wrote on the kids work then the kids responded to it and the teacher then checked that the students had responded to it here’s my point i think that if you’re going to take time to write individual comments on students work which is basically one-to-one tuition i don’t know a single teacher who can mark two books at the same time it’s the most expensive form of education we have so let’s make sure something happens so i would say to teachers if it’s worth your while taking time to write comments on students work it’s worthwhile taking class time for the students to respond so i think we should just completely change the way we think about feedback and if you’re giving feedback the next 10 minutes when those students are in the classroom with you they’ll be responding to the feedback that you give them but to make it even more effective i think we have to kind of make this feedback something that invites a response so this was triggered by looking at the work of an english teacher named charla kerrigan who rather watching comments on her students work this was a year 10 class doing an essay on shakespeare play they’d read she wrote the comments on strips of paper and each group of four students got back their four essays and the four strips of paper and their task was match the comments to the essays maths teacher said to us this is all very well for history and english but you can’t do comment only marking in maths if you take 15 of these equations as correct and put a cross next to five others the students could figure out for themselves they’ve got 15 out of 20 or 75 percent so we suggested well why not just tell them five of these are wrong you find them you fix them and so here’s the big idea rather than thinking about feedback as information think about feedback as detective work the idea is that the feedback should cause a puzzle or a challenge for the students to engage in so rather than saying remember to use the correct grammatical gender der di das in german which i call feedback as nagging how about there are five places in this piece of writing where you use the incorrect grammatical gender for der d das i’ve highlighted two of them see if you can find the other three and so by actually creating kind of invitation to respond to the feedback i think it makes it far more likely that students respond to the feedback in a positive way so tip one is make feedback into detective work i love it dylan just just one thing on that um it was a low point in my teaching career was those sunday afternoons it went into sunday evenings marking through a pile of 30 books the comments get worse and worse as i go through like child 26 they’re lucky if they’re getting anything in their books i’ve exhausted all my all my efforts and enthusiasm and then you give it back to the kids and then you’d have to hand out the purple pen and they’d have to do that then you’d respond to the purple with a green pen and the irony i always found was that the more detailed i made the comments the less impact it had because it was so supportive for the kids they didn’t have to do any thinking they were like all right i can see it all there and so on and whenever i first heard you mention this this um feedback as detective work i loved it for a couple of reasons i loved it primarily because it made the kids think more and it was much more active part of the process but also it’s less work for the teacher as well in a good way because i can just do as a math teacher tick tick tick cross cross and of course i’m making a note of general trends in the class which are the problematic questions any common misconceptions but i don’t have to write all these flipping big long comments give it back to the kids and then they like the almost gamification of trying to find where those wrong ones are it’s it’s brilliant i absolutely love it it’s great it’s great you