Whole-class feedback: saviour or fad?

This is the introduction to a three-part series. Click here to read the first post, here to read the second, and here for the the third.

Over the last couple of years, whole-class feedback has been enthusiastically adopted by a number of teachers, and we have seen a number of schools who use comparative judgement combine the two approaches very successfully. In this blog, Jamie McNamara explains how his primary school combined comparative judgement and whole class feedback, and in this one here, Tracey Goodyear does the same for her secondary English department.

However, as whole-class feedback grown in popularity there have been a few people questioning whether it really is that amazing or if it is destined to turn into just another edu fad foisted on unwilling teachers by out-of-touch senior managers.

We work with a number of schools who are using whole class feedback and have seen many different approaches to this technique. Here are my thoughts about why whole-class feedback really is amazing, together with three principles for making it as effective as possible.

Why whole class feedback really is great

One of the reasons whole class feedback is so effective is because the thing it is replacing — individual written comments at the bottom of each pupil’s piece of work — is so ineffective that it leaves a lot of room for improvement!

There are two problems with these traditional written comments.

1. They take an enormous amount of time

2. They are not that useful.

My favourite example of why they are not useful comes from Dylan Wiliam in Embedded Formative Assessment.

“I remember talking to a middle school student who was looking at the feedback his teacher had given him on a science assignment. The teacher had written, “You need to be more systematic in planning your scientific inquiries.” I asked the student what that meant to him, and he said, “I don’t know. If I knew how to be more systematic, I would have been more systematic the first time.” This kind of feedback is accurate — it is describing what needs to happen — but it is not helpful because the learner does not know how to use the feedback to improve. It is rather like telling an unsuccessful comedian to be funnier — accurate, but not particularly helpful, advice.”

When I first read this, I cringed, because I thought of the hours of time — typically hours on a Sunday evening — I had spent writing comments of this level of vagueness. Things like, ‘in order to improve, you need to infer more insightfully’. In The Writing Revolution, Judith Hochman makes a similar point about how this type of feedback just isn’t useful.

“I was struck by the difference in how we taught writing as opposed to reading. When I taught reading, I didn’t just give my pupils a book and say, ‘Read this’. I used a well-researched method, providing explicit instruction in decoding and using carefully sequenced activities that scaffolded skills until students read fluently and accurately. But when it came to teaching writing, arguably a far more difficult task, I had no way to give students the tools they needed. If their writing fell short, as it often did, we simply told them to “make it better” or “add more details”. Clearly, that wasn’t enough.”

Comments like this are TBU: true but useless. Often, it is seen as good practice to give pupils feedback that is taken from the mark scheme, or that is a pupil friendly version of the language in the mark scheme. But the mark scheme is not designed as a feedback tool. It’s designed to be descriptive, not analytic, and therefore to be true but useless when given to a pupil. As Dylan Wiliam goes on to say, ‘ The secret of effective feedback is that saying what’s wrong isn’t enough; to be effective, feedback must provide a recipe for future action.’

Principles for effective feedback

Done well, whole-class feedback is much better at providing this recipe than traditional written comments. In the next three posts, I will explore three principles that I think can make whole-class feedback as effective as possible.

One: make the feedback a recipe, not a statement

Two: focus on the pupil, not just the piece of work

Three: focus on the curriculum, not just the pupil

If you are interested in learning more, I am running a programme of online professional development from January — May 2023 which focusses on general assessment principles. The session on whole-class feedback is on March 13th. All sessions are free for subscribers who can register for them here. The schedule is below.