Sometimes you might find yourself unsure how to pitch your verbal feedback.

The pace of the lesson and the number of things requiring your attention can compound the issue.

A good fall-back in such situations is to use a structure to underpin your verbal feedback.

The structure does the work in advance; you only need to find the appropriate element of it and then use this to formulate feedback that is relevant and useful to the learner in front of you.

Here are five tools you can use to structure your verbal feedback:

Bloom’s Taxonomy

This is the taxonomy with which most teachers are familiar.

It delineates cognitive processes into a hierarchy of six categories: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation.

Each category is progressively more challenging than the last.

You can call on the taxonomy when delivering verbal feedback.

Simply ask yourself where the learner appears to be at and which category would therefore present them with a challenge, were you to base your feedback on it.

Taxonomies of the Psycho-Motor Domain

When the taxonomy of the cognitive domain was put together in the 1950s, thought was also given to taxonomies of the affective domain and the psycho-motor domain.

A handbook of the former was published in the 1960s, but no handbook appeared for the latter.

Subsequent writers have developed different taxonomies of the psycho-motor domain, however.

One of these, by Dave (1971), ranks the categories of psychomotor development as: imitation, manipulation, precision, articulation, naturalisation.

This structure is useful to call on when teaching practical subjects, as it tends to provide a better basis for constructing feedback than the taxonomy of the cognitive domain (also called Bloom’s Taxonomy).

You might also like to consider the category of invention as being beyond naturalisation – wherein the learner starts to invent new uses of the skill they have naturalised.

Concrete to Abstract

By and large, concrete ideas and information are simpler to comprehend than abstract ones.

We can imagine a continuum running from ‘completely concrete’ at one end to ‘completely abstract’ at the other.

With this in mind, we can seek to place our feedback at a point along the continuum which feels most appropriate for the learner in front of us.

For example, we might find a learner who is struggling to get to grips with the basics of a task.

In this situation, our verbal feedback will be better placed towards the ‘completely concrete’ end of the continuum than anywhere else.

General to Specific

Another continuum to have in your mind is general to specific.

This one runs from ‘highly general’ at one end to ‘highly specific’ at the other.

Arguably, as you get more specific the level of challenge increases.

When appropriate, it is another useful tool you can call on to structure your verbal feedback.

For example, you might find a learner who is breezing through a task and decide that highly specific feedback will cause them to slow down and look more carefully at what they are doing.

You thus use your feedback to raise the level of challenge and push the learner to think differently.

Mark-Schemes

The final structuring tool to suggest is the mark-scheme relevant to the work students are doing.

If you have a copy of this to hand – or are sufficiently familiar with it to have it stored in your mind – then you can use it to frame the verbal feedback you provide.

This might see you giving feedback based on certain parts of the mark-scheme or providing feedback that encourages students to think and work in ways that are more in line with the demands of the mark-scheme.

Either way, you are using the mark-scheme as an underpinning framework.

Other structuring tools are available – and I’m sure you’re familiar with ones not mentioned here.

They can all be used for the same end.

Namely, increasing the likelihood that the verbal feedback you give is tailored to the learner in front of you.

The structuring tool does some of the work for you; especially useful when you are under pressure, or your attention is divided.