As an undergraduate student I remember my own feelings of dread when my professor handed back assignments. Over the years I have tried – not without difficulty – to replace this dread with curiosity. Curiosity in response to feedback allows for growth. There’s a sense of exercising choice and creativity in deciding what pathways to take moving forward. This is in sharp contrast to feedback that exacerbates self-judgment or comparison with peers.
I would like to create an environment for my students to allow them to feel curious about feedback. I appreciate how Hattie breaks down feedback into three questions for teachers to consider: Where am I going? (creating manageable goals) How am I going? (the steps/process to get there) Where to next? (actions to be taken to move through these steps). Reflecting on these questions I’ve realized that I often only cover one or two of these questions. This list helps me consider how to give well-rounded feedback that covers all of them.
There are two issues that especially stood out for me in this reading:
- Providing feedback oriented towards the task, not the self. Hattie points out that couching critique in positive self-directed feedback actually lower the engagement of students. In the future I will attempt to work only with task-oriented feedback.
- Providing an environment in which students can take the risk of being wrong. This is not easy to do. In the classroom, I think this can be especially difficult in terms of feedback from peers. For written comments, focusing on how students can move along a pathway towards a learning goal may be helpful. Still, I hope this question will be covered further in this training.
