Below is the article that I wrote for our internal academic paper 'Illuminating Practice' in November 2010. It will be interesting to see if your feedback mirrors the learners from last year in any way. The type and content of your feedback should be your own though of course.
Summary of good practice
Teaching Communication and English means that student groups are varied. Learners can be assessed on some of the following: reading, writing, talking, listening, group working, summarising, analysing, self and peer evaluation, creativity, critical thinking and critical evaluation of literary texts. Different constituencies demand different approaches to teaching and learning, but one thing remains constant and that is the need for clear and meaningful feedback. It is apparent that there is considerable variety in the ways in which outcomes (tasks) and implications of student performance in assessments are communicated to our students.
After formative or summative assessment students may receive a written report on their performance from their lecturer, either as a standard proforma or as free text. Students may also participate in an oral feedback session with their lecturer, or be invited to make an appointment to discuss their performance if they wish. There is no doubt that feedback is vital to the learning process and the Communication and English teaching team value the importance of the student taking an active part in their learning. In a team meeting last year, I asked each lecturer to highlight how they deliver feedback to learners and prepared a short report for the HMIe reviewers. It demonstrated quite clearly the variety of methods we use and the positive effect this has had on the students. In this article, I aim to give a breakdown of how I approach the issue of feedback, illustrating my thoughts with qualitative data from a variety of sources.
Benefits of outcomes
Constructive feedback should not be taken as a criticism and it is important that learners understand the importance of feedback given to them by their lecturers. It is important that lecturers should be culturally sensitive to the feelings of their students and should give them honest, timely, objective and specific feedback in a skillful and tactful manner. Constructive feedback should aim at bringing self-improvement and development in our learners. It is equally important that students are given the opportunity to give lecturers feedback on their progress too!
I deliver feedback in a number of ways, depending on the type of assessment and the onus is on the student to be an autonomous learner. I use the ‘praise sandwich’ approach, which starts with a positive comment, the filling may encourage an agenda for future improvement and finally another positive comment or two to close.
This helps to reinforce what was good about their submission or delivery. When assessing oral presentations, I ask the student how they feel they have performed, using a checklist which acts as a prompt for them to self reflect. I ask for some supportive peer commentary before I deliver positive oral feedback, summarised from a written checklist used to mark the presentation. A reflective template is used for reading assessments, with responses in the main typed out with (hopefully) helpful bespoke comments to encourage the learning of the student .
Report writing, film reviews, essays and minutes may have extended feedback annotated on the student submission with commentary summarised on a checklist. Often the student is asked to sign a self-evaluation form saying that they accept the decision made and any comment they feel would help their learning in the future. It could be argued that Open Learning feedback (via a letter) is slightly more impersonal than other feedback mechanisms, as the lecturer may never meet the student. It is important to pitch this feedback at a level appropriate for the learner, using positive comments and encouraging them to keep working through the workbooks until they are ready for summative assessment.
In a classroom setting after an assessment has been successfully completed by all of the class, I often peer reflect on the good and not so good areas of learning from that outcome in the next lesson, to help refresh the parts that other students couldn’t reach…
This is an open session and I am always open to suggestions myself on how I could improve the assessment, organisation of materials, feedback mechanisms etc.
End of Unit questionnaires are used to ascertain what the student has learned and this reflective commentary is sometimes done verbally as well. I keep a log of comments from students (not just my own, but from all team members) after each semester and save them as a report on our shared drive. Feedback is wide and varied and gives the teaching team a sense of what we are doing well as a team and where improvements can be made, individually and collectively.
Noted below are the main issues gleaned from a large sample of students from the 2008-10 teaching sessions. I have omitted specific comments from students, carefully collated by me at the end of each semeser, but I am happy to share the information with any interested colleagues.
I break the document down into three areas – delivery and feedback, ICT use commentary and room for improvement. A summary of findings gathered from a variety of sources, such as end of Unit evaluation questionnaires, blogs, Wikis, letters, cards, commercial activity comments and e mails are noted as follows:
• Developing understanding and confidence building.
• Able to speak in front of peers without fear and nerves.
• Development of ICT skills.
• Positive and focused feedback by students and lecturers.
• Well organised lessons.
• Learners realise that they are more capable than they thought.
• Lots of encouragement and reassurances given about their abilities.
• Skills have been improved – listening, presentation, writing, listening, analysing, evaluating.
• Students are enjoying presentations more and more and feel involved in the assessment process.
• Confidence has been gained by learners undertaking the vast array of communication tasks we offer.
• Skills learned and applied to other Units and/or work.
• Students are engaging with our Wikis, Blogs and Google Groups more.
• Students have made quite a lot of comments about not being in rooms with computers.
• Students are commenting on relevant tasks and seem to like the fact they aren’t being over assessed in our classes.
• The flexibility of the curriculum has been noted by students learning at different levels of the SCQF framework.
• Lots of positive feedback about the lecturer’s role in the learning process.
• Students like using the remote control presenter and are happy with the Flip camera as it is unobtrusive where presentations and meetings can be easily saved on a USB stick.
Working examples
I teach Communication and Oral Presentation Skills to a wonderful group of Access to Languages students. Although this is just one of my classes, the reflective template minus the student names and signatures is used in a number of ways.
1. I give the student bespoke written and verbal feedback on their work.
2. I note the result on their work - remediate or pass (at first sitting).
3. The student looks at my comments and if they understand what they have to do, they continue with the assessment.
4. When the student has passed (and I have annoted their answer paper appropriately) they are asked to make comment on their work in a box titled 'student self-evaluation'. This is an opportunity for the learner to make a comment on such things as how well they thought they performed, what they thought of the assessment, what will they do better in the future etc. What they comment on is up to the student as I don’t want this section to be too regimented but I prefer it not to be blank.
5. When the student agrees with the result they validate the feedback sheet by signing it.
A selection of comments from students this semester are as follows. The summative reading assessment was an article titled ‘Digital books are a threat to writers’.
"When I first read the assessment I found this to be very difficult as English is not my first language. When I read it again and started to look at the questions, I actually thought it was a great resource for me and it turned out to be really appealing. I am glad that I passed as I put a lot of work into the assessment."
"I enjoyed this task more than I expected. Picking apart an article and analysing it was good. The assessment was helpful in terms of writing critically although I think I could have been more succinct in parts."
"I thoroughly enjoyed slowing down enough to really read and absorb a piece of writing and then produce a set of answers which had to be well thought through and relevant."
"This assessment showed me that I need to work on my time management a bit more. During the assessment I ran into a bit of stress because of that but am very happy to have passed. Although we had plenty of time to do it, I know at University there will be stiffer time barriers so I have to improve on that, without losing out on the quality of my responses."
"I am pleased with my overall assessment and evaluation of the article as this is my first assessment in a long time."
"In future I will pay more attention to reading the questions and when it clearly says use your own words, that's what I will do!”
“I think doing the assessment in class over a few sessions was a great way of taking pressure off me. Mind you, I am a Will Self fan so I might be a bit biased!”
“I thought the assessment was testing. We had done some practise reading in previous classes so I knew what was expected. The article itself didn’t really appeal to me and if I was reading a magazine with an article like that, I would probably turn the page over if I’m honest. Despite not liking the content that much, I know I have passed the outcome and that is what I am here to do”.
“I really enjoyed this task. It is a good way to test our skills to analyze and you have to think about lots of things. I will read news articles differently from now on. Thanks”.
Finally, I created a blog for this cohort at the start of session and I regularly update it to go over what we have learned in classes and invite students to make comment. It is one of the ways that helps our learners in particular to become confident individuals, effective contributors and successful learners in line with the Curriculum for Excellence capacities. The students enjoy using it and see it as a supportive aid to their learning, they like the tone of the blog and often comment on this (positively I may add)!
Different contexts:
Feedback is very efficient cross college, of that I am certain and there is no magic answer to how we should deliver it. I will leave the last words to Michael J. Gelb who notes "champions know that success is inevitable; that there is no such thing as failure, only feedback. They know that the best way to forecast the future is to create it.”
