Feedback is at the heart of the learning process.

It’s through feedback that students gain access to the information they need to progress, learn and develop.

Feedback is the means through which teachers communicate their expertise to students, bridging the gap between minds.

In the teacher’s mind there is a wealth of knowledge, understanding and expertise.

In the learner’s mind there is less of this.

Feedback is one of the ways the teacher transfers expertise from their own mind to the learner’s mind.

The success of this transfer is generally greater if the learner has opportunities to use, think about and act on the feedback they receive.

Feedback shapes student effort.

It is expert information provided by the teacher which the learner would struggle to access independently. Through feedback, the teacher helps students target their efforts, improve their thinking and change the processes in which they engage.

Students can provide themselves with feedback – and many do.

For example, a learner may attempt a task, look at the results, compare these to what they wanted and make changes.

Or a learner might find a question challenging and so go off and read an article about the topic to develop their understanding.

However, it is teacher feedback that has the capacity to really turn the dial for learners, helping them to be successful and make great progress.

Teachers provide feedback that learners might struggle to access on their own.

To illustrate the point, think about a class you teach. If left to their own devices, how many would find ways of giving themselves feedback and what level of quality would that feedback reach?

Now, compare this to the expert feedback you could provide in a single lesson, or by marking a set of books. The difference is significant.

Thought of in this way, we can see why feedback is such a central feature of teaching.

Feedback is the means through which the teacher coaches their learners.

It is distinct from the role of conveying content, though closely related. After all, if students are not learning about something or how to do something, it is much harder to give them feedback.

Feedback needs a subject. It must be on something.

Let us take a step back for a moment, though, and consider how feedback works on a wider scale.

Imagine you arrive home after a long day at work. Winter is on its way and the temperature has dropped. Immediately on entering the house you turn on the central heating. Slowly, the house begins to warm.

After an hour or so, the heating switches itself off. Why? Because you have a thermostat. This measures the temperature in a room and clicks off when that temperature reaches or exceeds the temperature you have set. The house gets as warm as you want, but no warmer.

Now consider what happens when your thermostat is broken.

The house may get warmer and warmer, with the central heating only turning off when you physically intervene.

Or it may never warm up, unless you go to the boiler and manually override the settings.

With a thermostat driven heating system, feedback is at work.

That feedback is of a rudimentary kind. It is the heat in the room in which the thermostat is placed. The thermostat reads this through a temperature sensor and responds accordingly.

This, in wider terms, is how we can define feedback. Information from the environment communicating a sense of what is going on.

Feedback in the classroom shares some elements of this definition but necessarily goes further.

When we use feedback as part of our teaching, we give students information about what is going on with their learning.

Traditionally, this information concerns what they are doing well and what they could do to improve.

Here we see a special feature of classroom-based feedback. It tends to be directional.

That means, it tends to tell students something about what is happening but, in so doing, also conveys a message about how what is going on can be changed, developed or improved.

This differs from feedback as found in our thermostat central heating system. There, the feedback has more of a brute function – to flip a switch. To change the state of the heating system from on to off, or vice versa.

In the classroom, feedback serves the teacher’s wider purpose, the one that animates all their work: helping students to learn.

Feedback is used to support learning. Ideally, it should be used to maximise learning; to help students make better progress, think more deeply and learn more than would otherwise be the case.