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CHAPTER 5

GIVE FABULOUS FEEDBACK

Every one of the strategies in this part is powerful, but this next one may be the holy grail of generating real student motivation and stronger effort. Here, you get tools to generate better quality feedback. As soon as you and I see progress, we get inspired. With feedback, the goal moves closer, and hope rises. That’s how it works for your students too. Your students need and want quality, ongoing feedback to help them learn. Engage the mindset that great feedback is the breakfast of champions. This is a way to frame equity from the conversation to action steps. Let’s break down the effects of feedback.

Give students intervention feedback on their learning, and get a strong 0.65 effect size (Hattie, 2009), meaning more than one year’s worth of academic gains. Give more positives than negatives (3:1 ratio) and be specific enough to focus on key things students can change. Finally, the kinds of high-quality feedback that you’ll learn in this chapter have the greatest effect on the weakest learners (Black & Wiliam, 1998). We start this chapter with a look at the value of providing students with ongoing formative assessment and then detail four specific forms of feedback: (1) qualitative feedback, (2) quantitative feedback, (3) micro–index card (MIC) feedback, and (4) student feedback. Unfortunately, these types are often those teachers least use. But you can change that path.

Ongoing Formative Assessment

Formative feedback measures progress over the long haul. Formative evaluation for both students and teachers has a very high effect size of 0.90 (Hattie, 2009). This factor is effective across many variables, including student ages, duration, frequency, and special needs.

The term formative assessment means you are using the evidence of learning (or lack of it) to adjust instruction toward a goal during the process, not just at the end. (See figure 5.1 for the feedback loop.) Researchers conclude in one meta-study that regular use of classroom formative assessment raises student achievement by a substantial level—from at least 0.40 to 0.70 standard deviations (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Wiliam, 2018).

Figure 5.1: Feedback loop.

One of the dangers of teaching without ongoing formative assessment is that you might go a week or two and still be unsure if your students are really “getting it.” But if you set up your class for daily multiple checks for understanding, you’ll learn fast and adjust fast too. Higher-performing teachers notice quickly what is not working and adjust rapidly, revise, and redo a lesson.

No matter what kind of feedback you use in your class, quality formative assessment needs the following five benchmarks to work well.

1. Having clear, shared goals: Teachers should share with learners specific goals for learning and the criteria for success.

2. Establishing progress: Students need to know where they are successful and where you need help.

3. Providing actionable feedback that moves learning forward: Students need a way to find out how to get better at what they’re doing.

4. Activating students as owners of their own learning: Teachers should empower students to engage with the learning alone or collaboratively to grow (learn it, own it, and share it).

5. Tracking: Students should see the big-picture trends and the details available.

These feedback benchmarks will lead to far more effective strategies than saying “Nice work” or “Good job.” Referring to this list often and posting it near your desk might be the single best way to boost achievement. The rest of this chapter has four more high-performing feedback strategies that draw on the five benchmarks.

SEA for Qualitative Feedback

We begin our feedback strategies with SEA (strategy, effort, and attitude) because it reinforces critical qualitative attributes that we want to foster in our students over the long haul. Students have no control over their DNA, their parents, or their neighborhood. However, students do have a huge amount of influence over the choices they make (strategy), how hard they work (effort), and the mindset (attitude) they bring to learning. The SEA strategy is a way to reinforce these in the classroom and ask “How am I doing?”

You will find that although SEA is specific, the real reason it is effective is that you don’t want to have to think in the moment, “How can I give specific feedback?” It has to become automatic and fast. That’s what SEA does; it gives you three quick ideas you can use without having to rack your brain. Each of the SEA qualities is a clear and potent replacement for using delayed tests (effect size of 0.31; Hattie, 2009) or saying “Well done” or “Good job” (effect size of 0.09; Kluger & DeNisi, 1996). Instead, using SEA, teachers give specific feedback in regard to strategy, effort, and attitude.

• Strategy: “I loved how you kept trying so many strategies on that problem until you got it.”

• Effort: “I like that you refused to give up. That extra effort will help you succeed again and reach your goal.”

• Attitude: “Before you began, you thought you could succeed. Your positive attitude helped you come through.”

Use the SEA feedback to build drive and long-term effort by changing who, when, and how often you give feedback. The who means you should never be the only source of student feedback. The majority should come from the student him- or herself, peers, computers, the physical results of actions, a rubric, or a standard set as a model or a checklist. The when means that sooner is better than later. The how often might be the most important question of all. Because feedback’s contribution to motivation, learning, and achievement is so high, ensure that your students get some kind of feedback (by their peers, the activity itself, reflection, or you) at least once every thirty minutes, every school day of the year. By using specific high-scoring, self-awareness feedback strategies with an effect size of a huge 0.74, you give students the gift of affirmation and light a fire (Marzano, 1998).

3M for Quantitative Feedback

The 3M (milestone, mission, and method) feedback process focuses on orienting students to learning in an empirical way. The beauty of it is its simplicity. This feedback answers the three most essential questions students have about how they are doing: (1) “Where am I?” (milestone), (2) “Where am I going?” (mission), and (3) “How do I get there?” (method). The effect size is a whopping 1.13, which tells you it is highly effective (Wiliam & Thompson, 2007).

The 3M process involves using feedback with students and training them to use the process, which includes three steps: (1) teach students the 3M process, (2) ask students to track their progress, and (3) guide students to improvement. Let’s look deeper at each of these.

Teach Students the 3M Process

Before students can use the 3M process on their own, you need to first teach them its critical pieces.

• Milestone (Where am I?): “Here’s where you are at right now. You got eight out of fifteen vocabulary words correct.”

• Mission (What’s my goal?): “Your mission is always to get a 100 percent on the end-of-the-month quiz.”

• Method (How do I get there?): “You’ll need a new strategy and plan to get where you’re going. I’ve posted some ideas you can choose from. Now, let’s set some fresh micro goals.”

Once you begin to use the 3M process with students, they will see its value. Over time, students will learn to self-assess.

Ask Students to Track Their Progress

For students to self-assess, they need data to track how they are doing. The data are simply their scores, which can come from self-assessments, a returned assignment, a student-graded quiz, or any other form of a written, numerical score. So, quality data could be as simple as sixteen out of twenty points on a quiz.

When tracking their data, students should be aware of their mission during this step. The mission is always simple; it is 100 percent. You may have students with special needs who start at a much lower score than the rest of the class. In their case, the mission focus is on 100 percent improvement (from three correct to six correct is a 100 percent improvement). These high expectations are a critical part of the achievement mindset. Keep them high, and focus on the micro goals (the method) necessary to make them happen. (If you need a refresher on goal setting and micro goals, refer to chapter 4, page 43.)

Guide Students to Improvement

A key benefit of the 3M strategy is developing student autonomy. Students will quickly figure out their milestone and mission but often need help with their method—how to improve their learning. Post a list of “How I Can Get Better at Learning” tips on the classroom wall to encourage students to try various ways of learning and to figure out, on their own, how they learn best. You can make your own developmentally appropriate list of student learning tools. Here are just a few examples.

• Ask more questions in class.

• Review work, and talk it over.

• Summarize the learning daily.

• Preview learning before class.

• Work closer with a study buddy.

• Create a mind map or graphic organizer of the content.

• Ask the teacher for specific help.

• Look up difficult concepts.

You can also have students draw the list and post it or fill out a goal-tracking worksheet. Imagine the powerful effects when students can take their milestone data (like “Eight of fifteen words correct”), reaffirm their mission (“100 percent on my next vocabulary test”), and decide for themselves how to improve their learning (“Maybe I should ask more questions in class”).

Students can keep their goal tracker in a folder or digital file, or teachers can post them on the wall as ongoing student work. I love empowering students to know and be able to act on the results of their own learning. They’ll know their milestones and their goal (mission), and they’ll choose their next step to get better (method). Finally, it’s most effective when classrooms use the 3M process at least once or twice a week. To empower your students to become better learners, help them learn the tools to do the work, then connect the dots for them. Students learning to regulate their own growth is the heart of the 3M feedback system.

MIC Feedback

MIC is an acronym for micro–index card feedback. It is a fast way to help students get unstuck and move ahead. In many classes, students with less confidence dread taking on challenges, creating, producing, completing, writing papers, or doing projects. One issue they have is starting off on the wrong foot and never quite catching up. MIC feedback deals with that issue. It is a way to get inside a student’s head to discover his or her thinking paths (and stuck areas) that might hurt his or her chances for success.

In language arts, writing a two-page paper can be overwhelming for students with little writing confidence. In mathematics, doing ten problems is a huge chunk for some students. In science, solving a problem or doing scientific thinking is a challenge. You will notice that the size of the process or project (or the number of steps required) is stressful or overwhelming. But students’ approach is key. MIC feedback solves that problem.

As you start the year (or semester), gathering MIC feedback is simple. Ask students to write their name on the back of an index card. On the other side, ask students to write about any one of the following.

• Two things about themselves that you (the teacher) should know but most don’t know

• Past experience in the subject area (in five sentences or less)

• How the week has been (what they liked and what they’d change)

• Goals for the class

• About parts of a paper (introduction, theme, thesis, evidence and support, argument rebuttals, summary, and conclusions)

• Three friends in the classroom (to learn how much social glue each student has)

• A five- to ten-word outline of what they are currently working on

• Advice for another, younger, student about how to approach most mathematics problems

For the first two weeks, ask for students to do one of these activities every other day. Read and sort these cards. You will quickly identify which students need which types of differentiation.

With this method, you can learn about specific topics that you would never have time to ask for individually. Over time, students realize they can get help from you (privately, if needed). Initially, this seems like more work. But quickly, students (and you) get the early information correct, and they can move forward in larger chunks faster.

On the social side, you can use the class time to have students work with just the right partner or in a small group to talk about what they put on their card and what they will do next. (Review chapter 2, page 21, for some group-work strategies.) With peer support, students’ assignments and projects will fit basic proficiency requirements and then you can focus on moving to mastery levels. Each time you use this process, the students will get just a bit better at using the MIC strategy.

Student Feedback

Perhaps surprisingly, the all-time best feedback is student feedback to you, the teacher (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). Getting feedback from students is simple. Consider the following four student feedback strategies.

1. Nonverbal information: This is my favorite strategy because it gives you live, real-time information about how you are interacting with your class. Start watching for nonverbal information. Observe students during seatwork time. Look for signs of physical or emotional distress during the task so you can stop and ask what your students are experiencing (“Can I check in with you for a moment?”). When you introduce something to your class, watch the body language. If any students roll their eyes and slump back in their seats, that’s feedback to you. Your hook or buy-in did not work (or it was missing from your lesson). If everyone except a couple of students is hooked, let each student get started, then go check on the isolated, concerned, or checked-out students. Bob Marzano describes this use of real-time information as withitness, which has a massive effect size of 1.42 (Marzano, 2017; Marzano et al., 2001).

2. Yesterday’s learning: Retrieval practice has a positive impact on learning (Ritchie, Della Sala, & McIntosh, 2013). To find students who are lost, use an activity to get feedback from the previous day’s class. Give students a blank sheet of paper and twelve minutes to write down everything they can recall from yesterday’s lesson. Collect their work, and quickly sort it to identify the struggling students. Then, reteach confusing concepts and correct your own teaching mistakes. This way, the students get better and so do you.

3. One-minute summary: At the end of class (as an exit pass), ask students to write an anonymous one-to two-minute note on two topics. First, they answer, “What is the most important thing from class today?” Then, your students answer, “What is still a bit confusing to you about today’s class?” Even though they’re anonymous, which helps students be honest, they’ll give you immediate, useful feedback on your teaching.

4. Suggestions box: Instead of having students use your classroom suggestions box in a passive way, use the suggestions box as a feedback tool. Ask students before class if they got a bit lost in the previous day’s class (and where). Then, during class give everyone a one-minute suggestion moment for feedback, and encourage them to keep it specific. These tools help you collect valuable feedback, especially if you have already taught students how to tell you what they need. At the end of class, use it as an exit pass. After you sort through the suggestions box once a week, tell students what you read, how much you appreciate their responses, and how you’ll use their ideas to get better as a teacher.

Students are remarkably candid and accurate in their perceptions of classroom climate. Without quality, continuous feedback, you may as well be teaching in a vacuum.