Using Student Feedback for Successful Teaching

Klaus Zierer, Benedikt Wisniewski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351001946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Feedback from students to teachers has been shown to have a major influence on students' achievement. Although the use of feedback from students requires little time and investment, the exploration of this topic in recent years has focused primarily on that from teacher-to-student or teacher-to-teacher. This innovative book examines the much-neglected feedback path from student to teacher and provides an empirically founded and practice-oriented step-by-step guide for teachers who want to get feedback on their own teaching.

Including a foreword by John Hattie, the authors shed light on the benefits, challenges, impact and academic discussion of student feedback. Topics include:

• an outline of the current state of research about feedback, including in the light of Visible Learning, and the essentials for translating this research into implementation in the classroom;
• the advantages of student-to-teacher feedback and how it is connected to good, effective teaching;
• the practicalities of putting student feedback into practice: finding the right questions to ask, professional discussion, and how to go about applying changes to your teaching;
• an exploration of combining digital technologies with the acquisition and evaluation of student feedback;
• the wider impact of feedback and how a "feedback culture" can transform not only individual teachers but whole schools.

Using Student Feedback for Successful Teaching is an essential guide for experienced and newly-qualified teachers alike who are invested in their professional development and who strive to deliver the best quality teaching for their students.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Feedback between desire and reality

We cannot say that there is no public interest in schooling and education. Every week, this is demonstrated in the daily press, where ideas and plans for educational reforms are discussed regularly and controversially by all kind of experts and alleged experts. It is surprising that these discussions do not always find their way into school staff rooms.

Why do so many people talk about teaching, but teachers themselves talk so little about it?

Bill Gates (who not a teacher but is interested in and committed to educational policy) concludes: “We all need people who will give us feedback – that’s how we improve professionally. But unfortunately, there is one group of people who get almost no systematic feedback to help them do their jobs better – teachers.”¹

Teachers often lack systematic feedback and, as a consequence, don’t talk about teaching. You may quickly be inclined to object: “That’s not true! We talk a lot!” This is beyond doubt: Teachers talk a lot about parents, students, colleagues, school administrators, the curriculum, and assessment. On average, however, they talk little about their lessons, the goals they pursue, the content they want to convey, the methods they choose, and the media they use. This reality is contrasted with numerous research studies that demonstrate how important feedback is in the classroom and how effective it is for students’ achievement. In this context, John Hattie’s work, known as Visible Learning (Hattie, 2008, 2013; Hattie & Zierer, 2017), should be mentioned first and foremost. Starting with Hattie’s work, the call for feedback to find its way into schools and lessons is more than understandable. If teachers talk more about students, the curricula, and assessment than about teaching and the impact of their teaching during a school week, then there is a need for action.

Is feedback something between desire and reality? In view of this area of tension, it is not surprising that in recent years several school development processes have been initiated to implement feedback in everyday teaching. The authors of this book both first worked at entirely different places to strengthen feedback in schools before joining forces through contact with John Hattie and have been cooperating since then (see Wisniewski & Zierer, 2017).

Benedikt Wisniewski: In 2012, when I was working as a school psychologist and teacher, I began to systematically use feedback questionnaires to reflect on my own teaching and to observe the lessons of teacher trainees. As profitable as this was, I found that paper–pencil processes – simply because of the enormous amount of time they take – are useless for this purpose. So I started working on a digital solution. As a co-developer of www.feedbackschule.de (English beta version, www.visiblefeedback.com), a system for app-based instructional feedback, I focused on the implementation of feedback in schools.

Klaus Zierer: I have become more and more aware of the importance of feedback both in practice and in research, especially through the transfer of John Hattie’s work to the German-speaking world. In the meantime, a large number of other contributions have been made, most recently with John Hattie in 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning (2017). Not least for this reason, I received a request from the Bavarian State Ministry of Education and Science, as well as from the State Institute for School Quality and Educational Research, to participate in a pilot project called “Student feedback during practical teacher training.”

There are many reasons why feedback has not (yet) made it to schools. In the light of our experience in recent years, we can name three:

1. Teachers are still socialized as “lone wolves.” This begins during teacher training at the university, where cooperative forms of learning occur, but usually not as a form of examination. In the same way, it also extends into the second phase of teacher training, which everyone has to do on their own. Teachers don’t learn to cooperate and to give each other feedback.
2. Teachers frequently lack the necessary skills and mindframes. Teachers neither learn how effective feedback is given and asked for, nor do they receive systematic support in terms of their mindframes on these issues.
3. Structurally speaking, there is hardly any time and space for feedback in the classroom. Competence and mindframes alone are not enough to enable feedback successfully. If they are present, however, a corresponding framework can become very important.

With this book, we will certainly not be able to dispel all the concerns we have heard about feedback. But our hope is to make a contribution that will increase the number of teachers championing the cause of feedback. In this respect, we will pursue three objectives:

1. First, we will shed light on the broad and complex field in the scope of feedback from the perspective of educational science.
2. Second, we will discuss a form of feedback that has emerged as one of the most effective in research: feedback that teachers get from students.
3. Third, we want to show that successful feedback is not just a question of using a technology that requires certain competencies. Rather, current studies indicate that successful feedback is based on a professional mindframe.

With these goals in mind, we have structured the book as follows.

Chapter 2 begins with an overview of the current state of research about feedback, especially the research presented by John Hattie and Klaus Zierer in 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning (2017). We are not interested in depicting the scientific discourse in its entirety. This would fail to reach the target audience of teachers. Instead, we try to focus on the essentials for the practical implementation of feedback in the classroom.

In Chapter 3 we discuss the reasons for student feedback (feedback given to teachers by learners), the advantages, and – more specifically – what it has to do with good teaching.

Chapter 4 focuses on student feedback from a practical teaching point of view: from the task of finding the right questions through effective collection of data to professional discussion and implementation of changes. In this context, we consider both the perspective of the feedback recipient and the perspective of the feedback provider. We show that the relevance of feedback is closely linked to the use of instruments that provide objective, reliable, and valid results. We outline psychological processes that can occur after one has received feedback and then illustrate how change processes can take place by means of practical examples.

In Chapter 5 we discuss the progressive combination of digitization and feedback. Using examples generated with the Visible Feedback software (www.visiblefeedback.com), we show how the acquisition and evaluation of student feedback can benefit from a digital solution. We use typical feedback scenarios and practices described in Chapter 4 to explain how feedback can work in practice.

Chapter 6 focuses on how feedback can become more than a tool for individual teachers, but it can also change an entire school. We shed some light on the dazzling concept of “feedback culture” and show how it relates to pedagogical professionalism.

Note

1www.wucftv.org/blogs/american-graduate/ted-talks-education-teachers-need-real-feedback/

Bibliography

Hattie, J. (2008). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. London: Routledge.

Hattie, J. (2013). Visible learning for teachers. London: Routledge.

Hattie, J., & Zierer, K. (2017). 10 mindframes for visible learning: Teaching for success. London: Routledge.

Wisniewski, B., & Zierer, K. (2017). Visible feedback: Ein Leitfaden für erfolgreiches Unterrichtsfeedback. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Hohengehren.

Chapter 2 Feedback in the light of Visible Learning

You may be familiar with teachers’ discussions about feedback from your own experience. Two camps can be identified quickly. While one side says, “Why should I ask students for their opinion? They don’t know what to do anyway,” the other side argues: “Absolutely indispensable! I can only improve my lessons if I get information from students or colleagues.”

Please reflect on your mindframe towards feedback:

• What role does it play in your lessons?
• Why do you use or not use certain feedback procedures?
• What are your reasons for this?

A closer look at the discussion reveals that it is not always clear what people are talking about: there is not always consensus on what the word “feedback” means. Please also consider the following questions at this point:

• What do you understand by “feedback?”
• What types of feedback are there?
• When is feedback successful – and when is it not?
• Who gives and who receives feedback?
• What is a prerequisite for successful feedback?
• What skills and mindframes do you need as a teacher in order to be able to give and receive feedback successfully?

We will answer these and similar questions in this chapter. It is deliberately not our aim to claim completeness. This chapter is not intended to be a scientific treatise. Rather, our aim is to draw attention to the topic of feedback from an educational-scientific point of view; to present the central results of educational research; and to stimulate a reflection on our readers’ own roles, expectations, competencies, and mindframes. Ultimately, we would like to initiate a conversation about all of these.

For this purpose, the first section focuses on the question of educational research findings, with the following argument: For a long time, the educational discourse was dominated by experience, intuition, and something like a “gut feeling.” Without wishing to disqualify these aspects, from an empirical point of view there are several findings which are worth taking into account in order to reflect on one’s own experience, intuition, and feeling and to be able to question them critically and constructively. In the second section, in the light of an evidence-based approach, we will examine the factor feedback in more detail by comparing it with other factors. In the third section, we present detailed results from primary studies in order to explain the criteria for successful feedback.

Therefore, after reading this chapter you should be able to

• explain the core statements of evidence-based teaching from an educational research perspective;
• describe the feedback factor in the light of key research findings;
• distinguish different levels of feedback (self/personality, task, process, and self-regulation);
• explain the feedback perspectives of the past, present, and future; and
• discern different feedback providers and feedback recipients.

Evidence-based teaching

These considerations show that there is a lot of experience in the field of education, but unfortunately it is not always clear which experience is important and which is not. Thus, myths are born: “Open instruction is better than traditional instruction,” “Teaching works better in smaller classes,” and “The comprehensive school system is superior to the joint school system,” to name just three examples.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by John Hattie
• 1 Introduction: feedback between desire and reality
• 2 Feedback in the light of Visible Learning
• 3 Student feedback
• 4 Student feedback in practice
• 5 Student feedback scenarios using digitization
• 6 Feedback culture and professionalism
• Index