Feedback Forward Basics: Fast and Detailed Feedback
How does Detailed Feedback Fit into the Feedback Cycle?
What is the Feedback Cycle?
Feedback is more than the information teachers give students about their work, skills, knowledge, and learning. Feedback needs to be an ongoing conversation: a feedback cycle.
The feedback cycle helps students understand where they are going, where they are, and where they need to go, so they can take responsive action.
Students should ask and answer three questions as they work towards a learning or skill goal:
- Where am I going? (What is my learning goal? How will I know I am successful?)
- Where am I now? (Am I on track to meeting my learning goal?)
- Where to next? (What steps do I need to take to improve or to move to the next goal?)1
When we help students engage in the feedback process and ask these questions, we enable them to think critically, take initiative, and work effectively with more independence over time.
Including the feedback cycle in the learning process increases students’ metacognitive awareness of what they need to learn, the progress they are making, and the steps they need to take to improve.
How does Detailed Feedback fit into the Feedback Cycle?
When students complete a formative or summative assessment, their work product is what elicits evidence of their learning. Providing students with Detailed Feedback interprets that evidence for them, in a manner that empowers them to understand the progress they are making. Whether or not students have reached mastery, this feedback helps them to move forward: they can take responsive action by acting on your feedback and improving their work or knowing that they are ready for their next goal.
In order for this feedback process to be most effective, you need to intentionally design rubrics, give students effective feedback and embed time for students to improve their work when needed and request additional feedback or support.
1 Learn more about this feedback process: Hattie and Timperley (2007).