Getting Feedback Right

This week’s article summary is Getting Feedback Right, and it’s an interview with feedback guru John Hattie.

For me, the article provided a few provocative nuggets.

First, while being able to provide effective feedback is key, just as important is the ability to receive and use it. Yet unfortunately most of us—including students—struggle receiving constructive feedback. One reason for this is the misuse of praise. While praising can strengthen the relationship between teacher and student, it often gets in the way of receiving and doing something with feedback. As Hattie explains, both children and adults hear the praise (a compliment) more than the constructive feedback (too often viewed as criticism).

I was also surprised at how much teacher-talk dominates classrooms. Nearly 90%! Hattie suggests that all teachers commit and practice to listening more and talking less.

Finally, I liked his two basic questions for effective feedback:

• Does it help a student understand what they know and don’t know?
• Does it help the student know what to concretely do next to get better?

Joe

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John Hattie has spent his career trying to pick through the "big ideas" in education to find what has the greatest effect on student learning. But it took him a decade to realize he was looking at one crucial aspect of learning all wrong.

"I used to think giving more feedback and better feedback was the answer to improving education, and it's the exact opposite: How do teachers and students receive feedback? How do they interpret it?"

In his newest book, Visible Learning: Feedback, Hattie digs into how the culture of both the classroom and its students can affect how feedback works, and what research suggests teachers can do to create a culture in which adults and students encourage each other to keep learning

What do people most often misunderstand about feedback?

There's very little research on how students progress; there's a lot more research on how teachers think students should progress. We asked 1,000-plus teachers what they meant by feedback, and it was very much focused on answering, 'How am I doing? Where am I going?' We asked many thousands of students what they meant and it was simple: 'Help me know what to do now.'

One of the ironies is that students who are above the average are less likely to ask for the 'what now?' feedback because they can usually work it out on their own. The kids who are below average really want that dialogue, want the information—and they're the least likely to get it. They get 'correct, incorrect, you could improve here'—checks and crosses that give them no information.

When teachers spend hours and hours writing comments, if there's no feedback providing concrete steps for the students to improve, students will argue themselves blue in the face that they never received anything. The key questions are Does feedback help someone understand what they don't know? What they do know? and Where they go?

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Are there differences in how students absorb feedback at different ages?

There are changes over time. Up to around age 10, there's a lot of compliance behavior. Kids think coming to school means, 'Sit up straight, do your work, and watch the teacher work.' They want personalization. We know, for example, when teachers give feedback to the whole class, every kid knows it's not about them and they tune out.

By 12, there's a lot more peer involvement and therefore kids welcome feedback much more if it's done privately than they do if it's done publicly. And all of us, regardless of age, welcome praise.

There's been some debate about the role of praise in teaching students. What do you think?

Teachers, being nice people, have a lot of praise for kids who struggle. The problem with praise is that it has zero-to-negative impact on improving the task or the work. That isn't to say you shouldn't praise kids, because that's the essence of a lot of relationships. But you should separate it, so when you are talking about the work, you should be talking about the work, not the person. If I tell you, 'Here are things you should change to improve,' and then I tell you how good you were, the next day, what do you remember? You'd remember the praise; that dominates.

Praise does make a difference to relationships, and obviously building relationships is critical. But I remind people that the reason to build a relationship is so that you can talk about the errors.

Can you think of one clear, low-hanging fruit to help teachers improve their instruction and feedback in the classroom?

In a study of about 12,000 classrooms in the United Kingdom, we found on average teachers talked about 89 percent of the time; that's not a lot of listening. What we want teachers to do is to interview students about, 'What don't you understand about what I said when I made these comments?'—so we start to focus on how the teacher's comments are being received. I do think the power of teaching is in the art of listening.