Questioning for Formative Feedback

Meaningful Dialogue to Improve Learning

Jackie Acree Walsh

• Editorial: ASCD
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781416631187
• Categoría: Bildung
• Categoría: Klassenführung

When used effectively, quality questions and student dialogue result in self-regulated learners and formative feedback that reveals progress toward learning goals.

Learning knows no boundaries. The potential for learning exists whenever and wherever we interact with our environment. So how can we infuse school learning with the authenticity and excitement associated with real-life experiences?

In Questioning for Formative Feedback, Jackie Acree Walsh explores the relationship between questioning and feedback in K–12 classrooms and how dialogue serves as the bridge connecting the two.

Quality questioning, productive dialogue, and authentic use of feedback are a powerful trifecta for addressing the needs of a new generation of learners. In fact, the skillful use of these three processes can fuel and accelerate the academic, social, and emotional learning of all students.

In this book, Walsh provides a manual of practice for educators who want to engage students as partners in these processes. To that end, she offers the following features to help create a classroom in which everyone learns through intentional practice:

* Blueprints for coherent models of key processes and products.
* Tools and strategies to help you achieve identified outcomes.
* Protocols with step-by-step directions to complete an activity.
* Classroom artifacts of authentic classroom use, including links to 21 original videos produced exclusively for this book!

Working together, questioning, dialogue, and feedback can transform learning for all. This book supports you in embracing and bringing that vision to fruition.

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Part 1

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Framing the Processes

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The argument running throughout this book is that questioning, dialogue, and feedback are the trifecta of elevated student and teacher learning—that when the three are intentionally linked in lesson design and execution, they have the power to dramatically increase engagement and achievement. The chapters in Part I offer a particular perspective and approach to these featured processes.

Feedback has traditionally been understood as one-directional (from teacher to student; evaluative; affirming or corrective) and closed (rarely intended to engage the student in continued reflection, which might lead to self-correction). Initiate-Respond-Evaluate (IRE) is the term applied to this process, and it dominated classrooms until relatively recent times (Mehan, 1979).

During the first two decades of the 21st century, increased interest in and research related to the purposes of feedback challenged this traditional view. Different ways of thinking gave birth to new terms, including dialogic feedback, sustained feedback, and feedback loop. According to Sadler (2010), "Formative feedback should empower learners to become self-regulated learners" (p. 536). Chapter 1, therefore, offers a synthesis of the features of feedback that fuel and sustain learning.

A shift in the understanding of the purpose and practice of questioning goes hand in hand with a revisionist view of feedback. Questioning, as defined herein, is a dynamic, interactive practice understood by both teachers and students as a way to support learners in developing personal understandings about the content under study. As such, it differs greatly from the traditional view of questioning as a tool used by teachers to evaluate whether individual students can correctly recite specific factual information. This approach to questioning requires a shift in beliefs about its purposes; related teacher and student roles, responsibilities, and relationships; and the classroom culture that supports the process (Walsh & Sattes, 2016). Chapter 2 defines and analyzes quality questioning and the nature of the academic conversations—or dialogue—it spawns.

Dialogue is embedded in the revisionist views of both questioning and feedback. Inherent to high-quality questioning are practices designed to activate the thinking and speaking of all members of a classroom community. Feedback is dialogic by nature, given the requirement for reciprocity to the process. Thus, dialogue can be viewed as the bridge between quality questioning and feedback.

The approaches to questioning, dialogue, and feedback that permeate the pages of this book share several key features:

• They involve multidirectional communication. Through these processes, students and teachers function as both producers and consumers of the knowledge key to teaching and learning.
• They move the locus of responsibility for decision making about learning from teachers to students.
• They reflect a constructivist view of learning, based on the belief that learners must make personal meaning of knowledge in order to remember it and transfer it beyond the classroom.
• They require teachers to be transparent with students about the what, why, and how of these powerful learning processes.
• They invite students to cocreate new ways of being together as a community of learners.

The next two chapters offer explicit understandings of these three processes, build the case for a more intentional focus on each, and clarify the connections between and among them and their relationship to student learning.

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Chapter 1

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Feedback That Fuels Learning

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How can we use feedback to advance student learning?

Feedback is universally understood as information a learner can use to close the gap between current knowledge and performance and a desired goal. Feedback becomes formative when teachers use it to adapt instruction to meet students' needs and help them close the learning gap (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Clark, 2012; Sadler, 1989) and when students use it to advance along a given learning progression (Brookhart, 2017; Wiliam & Leahy, 2015). Formative feedback, then, requires both teachers and students to be learners.

Effective formative feedback addresses both cognitive and emotional dimensions of learning (Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Yang & Carless, 2013). The aim is to develop self-regulated learners who generate internal feedback, respond positively to external feedback, and persist in efforts to achieve learning goals (Clark, 2012). Formative feedback is most successful when (1) students are learning and improving, (2) students are motivated and take control of their learning, and (3) the classroom culture supports the pursuit, use, and valuing of feedback (Brookhart, 2017).

Winne and Butler (1994) offer a comprehensive definition of feedback that encompasses ideas offered by other experts: "Feedback is information with which a learner can confirm, add to, overwrite, tune, or restructure information in memory, whether that information is domain knowledge, meta-cognitive knowledge, beliefs about self and tasks, or cognitive tactics and strategies" (p. 5740).

Feedback and Learning

Feedback is an integral part of learning, and a teacher's view of learning determines the form, function, and effectiveness of feedback (Askew & Lodge, 2000; Sadler, 2010; Sutton, 2009). When learning is viewed as a one-way transmission of knowledge, students are unlikely to reflect on how the information fits in with what they think about a topic or use feedback to modify or extend their thinking. Sutton (2009) argues for replacing the "transmission-reception" approach to learning with an "engagement model" oriented to creating "dialogic learning and teaching relationships that enable students to act on the information provided by teachers" (p. 3).

Language reveals the assumptions we make. Think about the language of feedback, which includes the concept of "giving feedback," an idea consistent with the transmission-reception approach to learning. Feedback as a gift (i.e., something you give) evokes the image of a finished product conveyed to passive recipients (Askew & Lodge, 2000).

Askew and Lodge (2000) offer ping-pong as an alternative metaphor where learners are seen as active agents in building personal understandings through a back-and-forth dialogue with their teacher and peers. This constructivist view treats knowledge as something created by students as they connect new information to prior learning and experiences (Hargreaves, 2005).

A third model of learning, dubbed coconstructivism, moves beyond a constructivist focus on learning as an individual responsibility to a collaborative approach in which responsibility for learning is shared among members of a community. Knowledge is constructed through loops of information and feedback, and learning and feedback thereby become intertwined and interdependent (Askew & Lodge, 2000; Clark, 2012; Yang & Carless, 2013). Volleyball or basketball serve as more appropriate sports metaphors for this model. Coconstruction of knowledge was on full display as 8th graders in Joseph Roberts's math class collaboratively solved a problem (see p. 6).

We emphasize the ping-pong and volleyball approaches to feedback. This is not to undervalue well-constructed teacher feedback to students as a gift when it is appropriate and useful. Like all good gifts, however, effective feedback depends on interactions that provide the giver with information to support decision making about the most appropriate gift to offer. As Nicol (2010) argues, "Feedback should be constructed as dialogue between teacher and student and/or peer to peer where meaning is constructed" (p. 8).

Feedback as a Process

Feedback addresses all domains of learning, and it is important to remember that formative feedback is a process—not an event. It is a dynamic intended to further the development of learner competence and confidence. Sawyer (2006) expresses the centrality of feedback to learning as he writes about the "new science of learning":

Learning is a process of continuously modifying knowledge and skills. Sometimes new inputs call for additions and extensions to existing knowledge structures; at other times they call for radical reconstruction. In all cases, feedback is essential to guide, test, challenge, or redirect the learner's thinking. (p. 234)

Planning and facilitation of formative feedback is essential to effective teaching. However, there are three aspects of this feedback that help illustrate its dynamic nature and foreshadow several issues involved in planning for its effective use. Namely, feedback is dialogical, reciprocal, and cyclical.

Dialogical

Feedback includes "all dialogue to support learning in both formal and informal situations" and, in fact, can "better be described as dialogue" (Askew & Lodge, 2000, pp. 1, 12). This type of dialogue can occur in three arenas: between student and teacher, from peer to peer, and within an individual student's mind. When it results from two-party communications, dialogue requires both participants to listen actively to each other and use what is said to reflect and revise their thinking.

The most effective kind of feedback, however, motivates students to begin an internal dialogue prompted by feedback received from others (Sutton, 2009). This involves self-questioning, a metacognitive skill that has a high impact on achievement with an effect size of d = 0.64 (Hattie, 2008). An important subskill related to self-regulation, self-questioning is actually a goal of formative feedback (Black et al., 2003; Clark, 2012; Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006).

Reciprocal

The principle of reciprocity characterizes effective feedback. This is an extension of its dialogic nature. Hattie and Zierer (2017) emphasize the importance of bidirectional feedback, arguing that student feedback to teachers is more important than teacher feedback to students. They write, "Learning and teaching are dialogic processes. Successful teachers are thus capable both of giving students feedback on their learning processes and of demanding and interpreting feedback from students on their own teaching processes" (p. 75). This evokes the ping-pong image where carefully framed teacher prompts ("serves") elicit student responses ("returns") with subsequent volleying as long as the ball is in play. Keep in mind, though, that the volleying associated with feedback is collaborative—not competitive as in the case of a game.

Relationships based on mutual respect and trust are preconditions for true reciprocity. Student willingness to provide honest feedback to teachers and peers depends on a sense of safety and trust that others will respect their responses, correct or not. Their acceptance and use of feedback also depend on their emotional reactions to others. An important teacher responsibility is to engage students in cocreating a culture that supports a positive social-emotional environment in which feedback can thrive.

Cyclical

Feedback needs to go beyond simply sharing information about student progress. For feedback to function in a formative sense, it must be used by the learner (Hargreaves, McCallum, & Gipps, 2000). In short, "Feedback is not feedback until students use it" (Wiliam & Leahy, 2015, p. 107). This process begins with the identification of a learning goal, proceeds through identification and collection of relevant data, continues with dialogic exchanges, and culminates when learners use the feedback to clarify understandings, modify strategies, or take other steps to move toward closer attainment of a learning goal. The final step closes the feedback loop and leads to the identification of a new goal.

The three feedback questions popularized by Hattie and Timperley (2007) relate to different stages of the cycle:

• Where am I going? (Feedup)
• How am I going? (Feedback)
• Where to next? (Feedforward)

These three questions relate to the three components of feedback: (1) knowledge of the desired learning goal, (2) evidence about current position, and (3) some understanding of how to close the gap between the two (Sadler, 1989).

Functions of Feedback

There are two overriding purposes of feedback: to serve as information students can use to move their learning forward, and to provide teachers with information they can use to make decisions about what to do next to advance the learning of individual students and the class as a whole. Effective feedback for learning furthers both of these goals.

Feedback Develops Student Capacity to Close Gaps

The most widely accepted purpose of feedback is to move students alo...