Learners must interpret the feedback we give.

They need to make sense of it.

If they can’t, then it becomes hard for them to use it.

Opaque or unintelligible feedback is stripped of its usefulness.

When it comes to clarity, one of the best approaches is to consider the extent to which your feedback can be decoded by a student without any further support.

This may mean rehearsing feedback in your head before you say it or write it.

The process of editing and refining means you then convey an end product rather than an initial formulation.

It need not take a long – a few seconds is usually enough.

Concrete examples nearly always help improve clarity.

You can provide learners with a brief demonstration of what your feedback means, refer them to exemplar work, or ask them to compare their work with that of a partner to identify similarities and differences.

Extending this idea, you might choose to begin your lesson by exemplifying for the whole class some of the feedback you have given, so that everybody has an opportunity to understand it.

A maths teacher, for example, might start their lesson by going through three key pieces of feedback they delivered to roughly seventy-five percent of the class.

They would exemplify and talk through each one, taking questions from learners as they went.

This points to a wider issue.

Once we have given feedback to our learners, we need to be certain they understand it.

If we don’t try to find out, there is a risk that the feedback doesn’t have the desired impact.

And we will probably only discover this further down the line, compounding the problem.

Here are some techniques you can use to ensure your feedback is sufficiently clear:

• Ask learners to signal if they don’t understand your feedback. Give them a sense of agency and encourage them to communicate with you as early as possible.
• After handing out books you have marked, circulate through the room and check learners understand their feedback.
• When giving verbal feedback, ask learners to repeat it back to you or to explain what it means.
• Scaffold and model some or all of the feedback you give.
• Adjust your language so it is personalised for the learner in question.
• Use examples, contrasts, diagrams and analogies to exemplify meaning.
• Stick to a structure for your feedback. For example, strengths first, followed by a target.
• If setting a task in which target implementation is central, plan to have a few minutes at the beginning during which learners review their targets and can ask you for help if anything is uncertain.
• Use reflection and review to give learners an opportunity to think about, discuss and analyse the feedback they receive. This may only be a couple of minutes, but it is time in which uncertainties will become apparent – giving you a chance to act.
• Identify specific learners who struggle to interpret feedback. Make a point of working one-to-one with these learners to support their efforts.

To sum up, there are two strands to ensuring your feedback is sufficiently clear.

First, pay attention to how you formulate your feedback.

Second, look carefully at how learners respond, elicit information about their responses, and be ready to offer further support where necessary.