One area on which you might like to focus your written feedback is mistakes.

This can take two forms: praising learners and suggesting where they could make improvements.

In the first case, we can give praise by highlighting how learners have learned from their mistakes and by indicating that this is a strength of their work.

We can also praise learners for making mistakes when these mistakes are a result of embracing challenges, taking risks with their learning, and pushing themselves.

Or we can praise learners for using trial and error as a tool through which to learn – with this inevitably including the making of mistakes.

In the second case, we can identify mistakes learners are making and use these as the basis of the targets we suggest. Or we can indicate that these are the areas on which learners should focus if they want to improve their work.

Here, we are using mistakes as a signal that the work is challenging.

And we are providing learners with access to the area of our expertise that will help them go beyond what they can currently do.

If you decide to focus your written feedback on mistakes – in part or in full – it is worth doing some preparatory work with learners, so they understood what is happening and why you are doing it.

Here are three steps you can follow.

Step One: Talk to learners about the relationship between mistake-making and being challenged

Help them to understand that mistakes are not a bad thing but very often a sign that the level of challenge is sufficiently high.

Give examples to illustrate this, including from your own experience.

Explain to learners that trial and error is an important way in which we learn, predicated on us making mistakes and then learning from these.

Step Two: Distinguish between careless and useful mistakes

Careless mistakes are those mistakes that learners could have avoided if they had been paying more attention.

They are the result of inattentiveness, rushing, or a lack of focus and are not indicative of a wider lack of understanding.

Useful mistakes, on the other hand, give access to information we can learn from, and which we can use to avoid making similar mistakes in the future.

For example, a misplaced comma is often a careless mistake, whereas incorrect use of a newly learned word is a useful mistake – because it helps us to better understand the meaning of that word and how to use it correctly.

Step Three: Model for learners how to make good use of mistake-based feedback

This has two parts to it.

First, you need to help learners understand that such feedback is essentially neutral or positive – it does not have a negative content.

Many learners struggle with this because they see mistakes as a problem – something to avoid rather than embrace.

You need to disabuse them of this idea.

Case studies, examples and exemplar work demonstrating how mistaking-making can lead to swift progress are all good tools to call on.

Second, show learners how they can take your feedback and apply it.

For example, you might show them how to identify warning signs that suggest they are about to repeat a familiar mistake.

Or you might give them a checklist they can use to identify when a familiar mistake crops up – meaning they are then able to do something about it.

Focussing your written feedback on mistakes means helping learners to see mistake-making as a useful part of the learning process.

It also means your marking has a clear focus – the identification, highlighting and correction of mistakes (though you might leave the latter up to learners) combined with provision of mistake-based feedback.

If used repeatedly, this can help give your written feedback a greater sense of coherence.

Learners come to expect that the information you convey will focus on the mistakes they’ve made and the learning they’ve done in response to previous mistakes.

This forms a virtuous circle as learners respond to your feedback, correcting, learning from and avoiding mistakes, only to make new ones as the level of challenge increases.

You then give new feedback on these mistakes and the process continues.