What do you want learners to do with your feedback?

Asking yourself this question means clarifying and refining the purpose of your marking.

If you have a clear sense of what you want learners to do with your written feedback, then it becomes easier to mark in a way that supports this purpose.

Conversely, if you don’t really have any idea of what you want learners to do, then your marking will have less focus, and your feedback may lack relevance.

To illustrate, consider two different teachers.

Teacher A knows what they want their learners to do with their feedback.

They want them to read it through when the books are returned, discuss it with a partner, then take their target and try to apply it during the next three lessons, after which, the teacher will take the books in again, mark them and see how successful learners have been.

They will then provide another round of written feedback.

Teacher B has a vague idea of what they want learners to do with their feedback.

Ideally, they would like them to understand it and to improve their work as a result.

They hope this will happen and plan to check in a few lessons’ time to see if it has.

There is not a huge amount of difference between the positions of Teacher A and Teacher B.

The key difference, though, is in the level of control Teacher A is exerting over the process of providing feedback and ensuring learners understand and act on it.

Teacher B is more passive.

Their intentions are good, but they are leaving more to chance than Teacher A.

Teacher A sees their written feedback as part of a wider process.

One that includes comprehension, reflection, analysis and action on the part of the learners.

They mark in accordance with this view.

Their intention is to provide information that learners will use in specific ways, in the lesson, under the guiding hand of the teacher.

There is still an expectation that learners will work independently and take ownership of their feedback, but Teacher A intends to set up a structure that facilitates this.

They also have a clear idea about how they will follow up and judge success.

Thinking about what you want learners to do with your written feedback means thinking about the impact you want that feedback to have and what you can do to ensure this happens.

It means your marking is underpinned by a sense of purpose.

One that drives your engagement with learners’ work and subsequently drives their engagement with your feedback.

To help you think about what you want learners to do with your feedback, here are some examples you can use or adapt:

• Try to implement it for homework and bring the results to the next lesson.
• Use it to make immediate changes to what you are doing.
• Use it to improve an ongoing project.
• Identify how you can use it to improve your most recent piece of work.
• Redo a section of the work I’ve marked, taking account of your feedback.
• Reflect on it, thinking about what you wanted to achieve, what you did achieve, and whether there was a difference.
• Use it to change how you engage with the learning.
• Use it to think differently about the topic.
• Adjust your efforts based on the information I’ve provided.
• Identify where the strengths I’ve identified can be found in your work – as well as the area for improvement I’ve picked out.

In each example, written feedback becomes part of a wider process.

The teacher marks learners’ work with the expectation that their feedback will be used in a certain way. They set up situations to facilitate this, maximising the impact of their feedback by ensuring learners use it in the way it was intended.