Success criteria are the things against which work is judged.
If you hit the success criteria – or surpass them – fantastic.
If you fall short, then you have something you need to work on.
Feedback helps learners understand success criteria.
Strengths signal what is good and therefore desired.
Targets signal that which is yet to be achieved but which will be beneficial if it is achieved.
In both cases, information is conveyed about what the teacher is judging learner work against.
Here are two ways you can use written feedback to effectively open up success criteria for your learners.
Always Use ‘Because’
As soon as you include this word in your feedback you are almost guaranteed that your sentence is explaining to the learner why something is the case.
Through this explanation you justify the strength or target you have given.
This justification connects to the success criteria on which you have called to make your judgement.
Compare these two written strengths to demonstrate the point:
- Your use of adjectives is impressive.
- Your use of adjectives is impressive because you’ve thought carefully about where to place them and the impact they’ll have on the reader.
The second example contains far more information.
The sentence pivots on the word ‘because’.
In so doing, it signals to the learner why the strength is a strength.
The success criteria you are using to make judgements are invoked.
The learner has direct access to your sense of what good looks like.
They can assimilate the semantic content of the feedback as well as the strength itself. This means they are more likely to remember why the strength is a strength.
Connect Targets to Future Success
When we give a target, we do so because we know that if the learner successfully implements it then their work will improve.
Our aim is to help them understand how they can change their work for the better.
The target is our call to action, directing the learner’s future effort.
To help them understand more clearly why this matters, we can connect targets to future success.
This helps the learner to appreciate the success criteria we are using to make judgements.
Compare these examples to demonstrate the point:
- Next time, I’d like you to focus on drawing your own conclusions from your findings.
- Next time, I’d like you to focus on drawing your own conclusions from your findings. This will make your write-up more successful by demonstrating that you can interpret the data using what you know about the topic.
As with the previous example, more information is conveyed in (B) than in (A).
But note how the target is contextualised in light of what successful implementation will give rise to.
The teacher is explaining to the learner why the target matters; what it will lead to that is not happening at present.
This makes life easier for the learner.
The target no longer exists in isolation.
Instead, it exists in relation to a reason for its being communicated.
The learner now knows the what and the why.
It is the ‘why’ that gives access to the success criteria.
