To best understand the impact of effective feedback, let us imagine what learning would be like without it.
Many of us learn without feedback. At the moment, I am reading a book about a topic with which I have little familiarity.
Through reading the book I am learning. No teacher is required; no teacher feedback is given.
I’m sure you will have learned many things in your life independently, without anyone else’s intervention.
Indeed, if you are reading this blog and the ideas are new to you, then you are learning without feedback. There is no teacher on hand giving you information to direct your efforts or to improve the way in which you are thinking about the text.
If feedback is not strictly necessary for learning, why is it deemed so important?
Why did you decide to read this blog to find out more about it?
And why do various major meta-analyses of educational research (see for example Black et al 2003; Hattie 2008; Higgins, Kokotsaki and Coe 2012) consistently place feedback at the top of the pile when it comes to effective teaching and learning interventions?
We can think about the answers to these questions by visiting a classroom in which no feedback is given.
One in which the teacher does not provide any student with any information about what they are doing well, what they are doing not so well and how they could improve.
In this classroom, the teacher arrives, teaches the lesson and then leaves.
They mark student work but do not give any feedback other than, perhaps, summative responses in the form of marks, levels or grades. But maybe they don’t even provide this.
So where do learners in this classroom find themselves?
First, their interactions with the teacher are severely restricted. A large proportion of the feedback we give is verbal. If feedback is excluded from our imaginary classroom, then the teacher is not interacting with students in anything like the way we would normally do.
Second, there is great ambiguity for students over where they are at and where they are going. They are left to work out for themselves if what they are doing is right. And they will have to give themselves targets or goals if they want something to pursue.
Third, the teacher’s expertise remains locked in their head. Students have no access to it. They cannot take it and make it part of their own thinking. Nor can they use it to direct their efforts.
In short, a huge amount is missing. The classroom is a sparser place. So much of the richness is lost. Content is being conveyed, yes. But beyond that there is little else.
Now compare this classroom with another – one I’m sure is more familiar.
In our second classroom the teacher arrives, teaches the lesson and then leaves.
But during the course of the lesson they circulate through the class, talking to students, giving them feedback, making suggestions, modelling, scaffolding and asking questions.
Maybe they also stop the lesson at a couple of points and give feedback to the whole class, re-teaching key ideas which are proving difficult for everybody to grasp.
When we look in student books we see formative marking.
That is, marking in which students receive information about what they have done well and what they could do to improve.
Finally, the teacher provides time in which students can work on their targets.
During this time, they call a few students up to the front of the class – students they’ve identified in advance – and work intensively with these learners, helping them to understand their most recent feedback, what it means and how to put it into practice.
There is so much more here than in our first classroom.
Interactions are richer, more detailed and more closely connected to the learning in which students are engaged.
The teacher actively looks for opportunities to deliver feedback – to transfer expertise from their mind to the minds of their students.
And marking is used to help students understand what good looks like and to provide clear direction on where and how they should target their efforts in the future.
This is a far richer experience.
One which makes better use of the teacher’s skills, knowledge, understanding and expertise.
One in which we would expect students to make better progress. While the evidence base tells us that feedback is effective, we can also deduce the fact through a thought experiment such as this.
As a final point, consider the journey a student goes through from the age of 5 to 18.
In an ideal world, as they progress through the education system, so they are taught by individuals who are increasingly expert in specific subjects.
A primary school teacher must be expert in several areas, including some highly specific topics. But their expertise is necessarily restricted, and they take on a more generalist role.
A teacher of A Level, on the other hand, is expected to have a high level of expertise in one subject; and will probably have a specialism within that as well.
As the child moves through the system, so the feedback to which they are exposed becomes increasingly specialist in nature.
The expertise they are accessing through teacher feedback when they are 11 is different from that which they access when they are 17.
Again, though, imagine a child who goes from 5 to 18 and never receives feedback. Who never has access to any expertise. For them, learning may well be harder, and probably less fulfilling as well.
And so we see why feedback has the potential to have such an impact.
