From Learning Enrichment Co-Ordinator Primary

Giving Feedback 

Giving feedback is a critical part of the teaching and learning cycle. It allows students to know when they have achieved success and what steps they can take to improve. Unfortunately, not all feedback is equal. There are many factors that impact the effectiveness of feedback.

Feedback needs to be timely, that is it needs to be delivered at the appropriate time for students to act on it. An example of this is a teacher actively moving around the class as students are performing a task to check for understanding. This allows the teacher to correct any errors or misconceptions in real time and to reinforce student understanding. In this situation feedback might be verbal or it could involve the teacher remodelling the desired skill or task.

Feedback needs to be given in a way that students can act upon it. Teachers may encourage students to focus on a specific element of their work to improve on, such as punctuation, letter formation or work choice for writing, and ignore other errors at the time. This allows students to focus on a particular skill without being overwhelmed by too much information that will overload their working memory. Once skills are mastered and become more automatic they use less memory and students are able to move on to work on higher order tasks.

At Lumen Christi, we approach feedback as a complex and dynamic process that needs to be tailored to different settings and students. Whilst going through student work at the end of the day can be a valuable tool for teachers to assess student understanding it does not allow students to be directly involved in the feedback cycle. For this reason, teachers are constantly checking for understanding during lessons and engaging with students to provide feedback that works in context. Often work in students' books or worksheets may have limited or no written feedback at all, instead teachers can use strategies such as individual whiteboards, choral response, partner sharing and direct questioning to check that students are on track and understanding the key teaching points of lessons. 

As always, if you have any questions about your child’s learning, please don’t hesitate to contact their teacher