How to Mark and Give Feedback

It's not what you think

After a string of 5 Star reviews of my book, The Full English: how to be a brilliant English teacher, I got my first 3 Star comment: “I wish there was more in there about marking and feedback in English.”

Well, this is useful feedback to me. It means that for this teacher I haven’t been crystal clear. (I will re-edit the book accordingly - one of the benefits of self-publishing).

Crystal Clarity

Feedback is only what makes a student improve. Anything intended as feedback which doesn’t then make the student improve is just noise.

Extract from The Full English

Feedback is a bit of minefield. We all think we know a lot about it. I hope this chapter might both liberate and surprise you.

Although both Hattie (d=0.7) and the EEF Toolkit (6 months extra progress) rate feedback as one of the very top interventions we can offer, there are caveats.

Approximately a third of the feedback we offer actually makes students worse. Students need to be receptive to the feedback they receive. How many corrections can they receive before switching off, or worse, actively avoid thinking about success in our subject? Then there is the issue of cognitive load – how much feedback can a student handle in working memory? Now, even when the student is fully receptive to that feedback, what should they do next? And when, and how often should they act on this feedback?

Solutions

Only give feedback to students on what you want them to practise. Your skill is to weigh up the 10 pieces of advice or success criteria you could give them, and pick the one which will have most impact. Give them only that piece of feedback at one time (or a maximum of 3-4 if working from a model). You may work in a school where leaders will accuse you of being lazy. Or more typically, you will probably have been trained to work too many hours, and seek to give more detailed feedback. If I can’t persuade you to do less, at least bear in mind what cognitive load says: 3 action points is enough. But, morally speaking, if you don’t have a plan for making the students act on those points of feedback, don’t give them. Otherwise your feedback and action points will become pointless and demotivating for students, and a waste of your time.

The main problem with feedback and success criteria is that it is abstract to your students. Here is the solution:

The Visualiser

Every time you use the visualiser, you make the abstract concrete. We deal in abstract ideas all the time, but because we understand them so well as subject experts, we have no idea how this will flummox out students.

Here are some totally abstract ideas which you might take for granted:

Use embedded quotations.

1. Write a longer explanation

2. ‘Write a lot about a little’.

3. Link your ideas.

4. Include alternative interpretations.

5. Use better vocabulary.

6. Don’t switch between past and present tense.

7. Start your paragraph with a connective.

8. Start your paragraph with a topic sentence.

In fact, almost every piece of advice we can give students will appear abstract and opaque to several members of the class and perhaps to the majority.

However, the moment we put the student’s work under the visualiser and show where the error is, and then talk through and write the correction, the abstract becomes concrete. Students can now literally see what you mean.

How to Teach From Model Answers (Worked Examples)

Any time you want students to produce a specific type of writing, you have to provide a model. Typically, novice teachers might simply say, ‘write a paragraph about’ or ‘write an article’ or ‘write the beginning of a story’ or ‘write a description’ – you get the idea. More skilled teachers will offer success criteria. But remember success criteria are concrete to you, yet abstract to many of your students.

The most skilled teachers provide a model. Because they are aware of cognitive load, they show 3 or 4 things in the model that make it excellent.

Then they ask students to imitate these in their own writing. A brilliant scaffolding task might even be to write the same model.

When Students Reproduce the Same Model

Let’s imagine an exam question on the language paper. We teach the technique of the question type. Then students write an answer. We then give them feedback on this answer. Then at some point they attempt another of the same question type, from a different exam paper. Makes sense, right?

Not really. Remember, we assume our feedback on the student’s answer has been concrete. But how do we know? There is only one way. Ask the student to write their answer to the same question again. In theory, your feedback should have allowed them to score nearly 100% on the question. When they reattempt the question, you will have a very precise measure of how far they have understood your feedback, and a very precise idea of their next steps (because very few of them will actually score 100%). This will tell you if they have understood how to answer the question type.

If you simply move on to the same question type on a different text, you have no way of knowing whether marks are lost because of a misunderstanding of feedback, or the demands of the different text. And neither will the student. So, I can’t stress this enough (because it will feel unnatural to you), the only way to get the student to fully understand your feedback on an exam question is to make them do the same question again.

Adapting the Model

This doesn’t just work for exam questions, it works for any piece of writing which you value in your curriculum. Here is an example from KS3. Imagine you are teaching your students how to control the reader’s experience of sound in descriptive writing. You might begin with some Dickens as a model. These examples come from my Ultimate Guide to Descriptive Writing:

Extract from Oliver Twist

Countrymen, butchers, drovers*, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds* of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bellowing and plunging of the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every public-house*; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng*; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses.

Words with an * you would need to provide a key for.

Identify the Sound Words

Whistling     barking     bellowing     plunging     bleating     grunting     squeaking     cries              shouts     oaths     quarrelling     ringing     roar     Crowding     pushing     driving     beating     whooping     yelling     discordant     din     resounded                 running     bursting

Now that we have these words, I am going to use them in another model. I can write about anything of course, but I want to learn to write like a real writer. So, here I pick JK Rowling, and try to use these words in a paragraph which might fit into a Harry Potter book. The instruction to students will be to pick a book that they know. I’ve picked Harry Potter because even the non-readers will probably have seen at least one film.

Adapted for Harry Potter

Harry and Ron were late for the Hogwarts Express, and the whistling of the train’s great engine came ringing down the platform as they ran, bursting through the crowded passengers. The progress of the Slitherin students could be guessed from the onslaught of grunting, shouting, oaths and quarrelling along the platform, as Malfoy and his admirers demanded the best carriage. The younger students were still bleating excitedly, squeaking in young voices, which reminded Harry of his own first trip. Then the barking and bellowing of the porters and train guards had felt like a discordant din, but now the resounding clamour made him feel entirely at home. They spotted Hermione and Ginny, pushing through a throng of sixth formers and Ron let out an embarrassing whoop.

Now I can ask student to use words from the list of Dickens’ words in their own description. I won’t need to give them lots of success criteria like this:

·       Write in the past tense

·       Use lots of lists

·       Increase the sense of action and sound by using past participles

·       Use semi colons

·       Use lots of adjectives

·       Use alliteration

·       Use onomatopoeia

·       Include noun phrases

·       Include clauses

These are all things that Dickens does. But I just need my students to act on one piece of feedback from the novel – use this vocabulary to control the reader’s experience of sound, or to create a soundscape.

I know that the model will differentiate to each student. They will automatically pick some of Dickens’ other skills in their own version, and this will be completely concrete to them. By that I mean they can only imitate what they understand, so they will take from the model exactly what their current level of understanding allows. It is perfect differentiation and feedback, because it is exactly the right piece of advice the student needs.

Here is another example I might give to students, especially if I suspect they are not readers.

Adapted for the TV show Friends

The party hadn’t yet descended into quarrelling. Phoebe was singing about Smelly Cat again, a discordant din that somehow didn’t make her any less attractive. Ross was drunk now, bellowing something about the T.Rex not having short arms, and barking at Monica that yes, palaeontology was a sexy science. Monica was in the kitchen again, keeping the party fed, pushing sausage rolls at the bleating crowd they knew from Central Perk. Joey could be heard grunting his way through a whole plate of spiced chicken wings, and mouthing oaths at Chandler who tried to steal one from his plate. Whooping as he succeeded, Chandler ran, bursting into the bathroom, where Janice cornered him, her screaming, squeaky voice ringing in his ears - something about Rachel being on a break.

In my teaching from these I might point these things out:

1. Remember that we are not putting in every sound we can think of.

2. We have to make sure the sounds fit the type of story we are writing.

3. We have to imagine them in a book which people would actually read, not an exam answer.

4. If the reader ever feels one of these sounds is only included to prove we are describing, rather than to tell us something important, they will stop trusting us and the story we’ve written.

A maximum of 4 things: you know why. (Students will learn more than just these 4 things, because of the way the model differentiates so exactly, as described above).

Now students write their own texts, using words from the list we identified from Oliver Twist.

Once they have made some decent attempts at improving the soundscape of their writing, I can focus on something else in the model. What would have highest value? For me it would be the semi-colon.

There are 12 other feedback techniques explained in The Full English:

1. Type 2 Learning, where students learn from success criteria. This has limited impact.

2. Type 1 Learning, where students learn though imitation. This has profound impact.

3. Of The 8 Essential Technique of Teaching, 6 are forms of effective feedback: Cold Call, Tracking Not Watching, Show Call, Narrate the Room, Do Now, League Table Effort, Progress and Attainment.

4. Why the visualiser needs to be used every lesson.

5. Why lollipop sticks are not a gimmick.

6. How to use booklets to give feedback and show call.

7. How to teach speaking and listening: students speaking in sentences and paragraphs.

8. Frequency of knowledge assessment.

9. Comparative judgement.

10. Self and peer assessment, and how we train students to do both.

11. Exam practice.

12. Developing a ‘Plan of Attack’ for high tariff questions.

I’ll deal with some of these in the next post. If you want to read it, it will be worth subscribing so you get notified!

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If you want to pass Ofsted with flying colours, you’ll like The Unofficial Ofsted Survival Guide

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