Teacher Tip: Providing more meaningful and personalized feedback

In my previous role managing an in-person English language training program for adults, a big part of my job was to listen to students outside of the classroom.  They came to me for help and advice.  They also came to me to “provide constructive criticism” to me and their teachers. It was my job to guarantee that they loved their courses, and if they didn’t, I heard a lot about it. As I should; it’s not cheap to travel across the world to study English for a few months, especially if you have to take a break from your job in order to do it.

When I started the role, the constructive criticism I heard the most was “I want more feedback.”  At first, this baffled me. Observing classes was my favorite thing to do, and what I saw were fun, communicative lessons in which students were consistently receiving error corrections and positive encouragement.  

So, to figure it out, we held student focus groups. The result blew my mind.  Not because they were so earth-shattering, but because the answer I got over and over again was so simple: error correction and encouragement is not really feedback.  Or, yes it is feedback, but only in the most limited and impersonal sense of the word.  It’s not the kind of feedback that gives specific information about how students can see long-term, transformative language improvement. What the students actually wanted were the answers to these two questions:

What do I still need to improve? 

What have I already improved?  

And, they wanted these questions to be revisited frequently throughout the week.

Sounds easy enough, but if you’re working for an IEP (rather than a more long-term program with a limited number of students and fixed start/ end dates),  this poses a huge logistical challenge.  How do you actually keep track of that much information if you have a lot of students who are joining and leaving the program at different times? 

Well, to be honest, I don’t believe there is one magic bullet that solves this issue. However, we did come up with 3 strategies that were efficient and flexible enough to be integrated into any course:

1) Goal-setting worksheets

If you have a lot of students who have diverse backgrounds and learning motivations, the kind of feedback to focus on is not always evident.  One thing you can do to stop the guesswork is to give every new student a goal-setting worksheet on their first day that can be reevaluated frequently. The goal-setting worksheet I use has students reflect on what aspects of using English they feel comfortable with already, which areas they feel they need to improve, and what specific actions they intend to take to  work toward that goal within a specific amount of time.   When you check in with that student later on, having this documentation can help you give more meaningful and personalized feedback for letting students know where they stand and where they’re headed. It also helps students become more accountable for their own learning.  

2) Customized Rubrics

So some of you are saying to yourself, “duh, rubrics.” But honestly, I’ve seen a lot of very useless rubrics out there.  This is a huge shame because rubrics are one of the most tangible ways to evidence student learning at various steps throughout their journey.  Rubrics need to be easy for teachers to use and provide specific insight that is practical to students. For me, the best rubrics include four elements: 1) A table/scoring guide of criteria focused on specific activity/project aims and how they were met; 2) an area to write notes about each of those criteria and observed errors/encouragement; 3) an area to summarize what went well and what could be improved; 4) an area for students to reflect on what went well and what didn’t.  A lot of rubrics I’ve seen only include one or two of these elements, which limits how much you can get out of an assignment after it is completed.  

3) Peer feedback

There are a lot of benefits of creating a culture of peer feedback in the classroom.  For good or for bad, students often compare themselves to their classmates as a gauge of their own abilities and progress, so it’s a good idea to teach students how to do that in a practical and upbeat way.  Peer feedback rubrics are an obvious option for this, but there are many other ways to implement feedback in a way that will help foster an engaging and supportive classroom environment.  For example, you can integrate peer feedback into presentation activities by giving related tasks to the student audience. One example I liked was a teacher who had students roll dice after presentations to determine which classmate(s) would give one positive and one constructive comment following the presentation. Another example is to have students count specific elements of their classmates’ presentation, like how many times the target language was used or how many times they said “um.”  By training students how to give feedback, you help them become better stewards of their own progress over time, which will ultimately enrich their experience. 

We would love to hear from you about experiences (positive or “illuminating”) that you’ve had with these strategies or other strategies you’ve tried. Leave a comment below or send us an email at info@eschoolenglish.com.