Make feedback into detective work
What’s the problem?
For many, many years I have been frustrated by the time and effort that I put into marking and giving feedback, versus the time and effort my students put into to responding to that marking and feedback.
Here is a typical scenario: I spend Sunday afternoon working my way through a pile of 30 books to mark a homework assignment. Book 1 gets a lot of my attention – I mark diligently and respond to any errors with lengthy, carefully considered written feedback, complete with bespoke follow-up tasks for students to complete. 30 minutes later, when I am now on Book 4, my patience is wearing thin – the ticks and crosses get sloppier, the written feedback gets shorter and contains clear traces of my frustration (an exclamation mark at the end of every phrase being a clear giveaway). 3 hours later, when I finally get to that last book and I see another mistake, I want to scream, cover the work in a big, red cross, and scrawl in capital letters: ARE YOU TRYING TO WIND ME UP!!!!!!
And breathe.
I would feel slightly less animosity toward the time I spent marking and giving feedback if it had a significant impact on my students’ learning. But whenever I gave my students their homework back, they tended to do two things: first, look at their score; second, look at the score of their mate. And my carefully considered feedback, written with blood, sweat and tears?… a cursory glance at best.
The equation was all wrong. The time and effort I was putting in nowhere near matched what my students were getting out of it.
What’s the tip?
Fortunately, Dylan has an answer – make feedback into detective work.
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
Here is how it looks for me as a maths teacher.
I go through the pile of 30 books, but instead of placing ticks and crosses on the students’ work, I simply write their score, say 7/10. As I do this for each student I also make a note of any questions that appear troublesome across a number of books so I can engage in whole-class feedback later on.
Then, when I give my students their books back, I set them a challenge: I have told you how many questions you got wrong, but not which questions. Find them, and try to correct them.
I find this works best by giving my students, say, 5 minutes to do as much as they can independently, before then working with their partner to compare answers and support each other. I can then project the full set of correct answers on the board, address the significant issues I identified during the marking with the whole class, and pick up any lingering individual issues later in the lesson.
Much less work for me, much more work for my students, and the gamification of the marking process leads to an engaging, productive activity.
Dylan shared some strategies to make feedback into detective work for other subjects:
- ‘Here are the 4 sets of comments on your groups’ essays. Match each comment to an essay”
- ‘You have made 4 apostrophe errors. Find them and fix them.’
- ‘I have highlighted two of your grammatical mistakes. Work out why they are mistakes, and see if you can find the other three’
Over to you
- Is there a lesson this week where you could try this tip?
- What would you need to change to make the tip work for you and your students?
You can watch the original video where Dylan shares this tip.
Thanks so much for reading and have a great week.
Craig