Some learners struggle to engage positively with feedback.

They may see it as an attack and choose to disengage.

This can be due to past experiences, self-perceptions, or wider attitudes to learning.

One way you can overcome the problem – and help learners to see feedback in a more positive light – is through distancing.

Instead of telling learners what you think is good about their work and what could be improved, ask them to work with you to think from someone else’s perspective.

For example:

• ‘If someone else had produced this piece of work, what feedback could we give them?’
• ‘If a learner at another school brought this work to show us, what could we tell them about it?’
• ‘Imagine an expert was looking at this work – a scientist working in a research lab, for example. What might they like about it and what might they suggest to improve it?’
• ‘What might a learner from the year above think about this work? How might they think it could be improved and what might they like about it?’
• ‘If you were the teacher and you were looking at this piece of work, what would you tell me about its strengths? And what might you suggest for an improvement?’

In each of these examples the teacher invites the learner into the process of assessment.

They do this by asking them to think from someone else’s perspective and to use this perspective as a way in which to think critically about their own work.

This is how the distance is created.

No longer does the learner feel feedback is being done to them, instead a level of objectivity is introduced, and the feedback takes place at one remove.

This technique does not always work – and it depends to some extent on how defensive the learner is about feedback – but it often proves successful.

You can also use it as a general tool for helping learners to think about their own work, even if they are not particularly likely to disengage from direct feedback.

The technique lets learners see their work from a different perspective and to think about it through the lens of a third party.

This helps them gain revealing insights and is also a way to make them think more critically about what they’ve produced.

Here are two examples to illustrate.

Example 1: Sociology

The teacher hands back a set of essays.

They have marked these but, for the moment, are keeping their comments to themselves.

Instead, they hand out a sheet explaining what an expert sociologist looks for when they are reading an essay.

They then play a video of a sociologist talking about their job, how they write and what they try to achieve with their writing.

Next, the teacher invites learners to work in pairs to critique their essays, not from their own perspectives but from the perspective of an expert sociologist.

Learners use the sheet and the ideas from the video as a scaffold.

While this is happening, the teacher circulates and offers further help and support.

Once sufficient time has passed, the teacher reveals their own feedback to learners – they might do this while they are circulating – and asks them to compare this with what they came up with during their distancing session.

The process serves two ends.

First, it helps learners to look at their work from a different perspective and to critique it in this light.

Second, it gives learners a chance to compare their distanced assessments with the teacher’s point of view.

Through the comparison they can reflect critically on their own thinking and build up a better sense of what good looks like.

Example 2: Psychology

The teacher asks learners to assess a piece of work they have written and to do this from the perspective of a particular psychological school of thought such as psychodynamics, cognitive psychology or the biological approach.

A crib sheet is provided as a support.

This outlines the key ideas of the perspective and the kind of things a psychologist of this persuasion would look for.

When learners have assessed their own work, the teacher challenges them to look at it again, but this time from a different perspective.

For example, if learners first used the psychodynamic approach to critique their work, now they must use the cognitive approach.

Support materials are again handed out and learners are encouraged to contrast the results of their two efforts, when they have completed them.

Finally, the teacher provides the class with general feedback connected to the piece of work being examined.

Learners are then asked to compare this with the results of their own efforts before, finally, coming up with a summary comment they feel offers an accurate representation of the strengths displayed and the one area on which they could focus to improve things.

This process, while a touch convoluted, helps learners to develop a broad picture of their work.

They assess it through two different perspectives, distancing their thinking in the process, then synthesise their findings with the teacher’s own thoughts.

Bringing all of this together, they can form a fairly nuanced, fairly detailed judgement about their work and communicate this with a good amount of evidence on hand to act as a support.

Used repeatedly, the technique helps learners develop a more critical mindset, meaning they can judge their own work with increasing skill.