Feedback Loops

And where to find them

Photo by Georg Eiermann on Unsplash

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It is almost a cliché to discuss feedback in education. Systematic reviews promote its virtues, but the enaction of feedback in schools suffers from a lack of imagination. For most of my career, feedback has been synonymous with marking. It is something we give to students. “You need to avoid run-on sentences,” we write at the end of two pages of run-on sentences, even though the student would probably have avoided run-on sentences if they knew how to do so.

Once we realise that teachers are those in schools with the greatest agency, we begin to understand that it is feedback to teachers on the effect of their teaching that is critical. And this opens up a wide range of potential approaches working at different levels of grain size, along with some key pitfalls to avoid.