Working with students:

Effective teacher/student feedback

(extracted from Glen Pearsalls latest book Classroom Dynamics A Teachers Handbook TLN Press 2012)

Glen Pearsall, Author and Educational Consultant

Effectivefeedback is at the heart of good

teaching. Feedback ensures students
arent just taught it helps them learn.
However, the workload demands of
constant correction can undermine
a teachers effort to foster feedback.
Indeed too often when we talk about
feedback we end up talking about yet
another thing for which teachers are
responsible. However, students have
a very significant role to play in this
process. Feedback after all is a two-way
activity, or it isnt feedback.
Being able to quickly elicit and respond
to student feedback should then be a
goal of all teachers. Learning works best
when the everyday classroom is the site
of a constant conversation about ways
to improve student performance; when
assessment happens minute by minute,
and day by day, not at the end of a
sequence of learning. (Williams &
Black 1998)
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What follows are a series of strategies

for achieving this goal. Each of these
activities has been designed to be a
highly engaging way to quickly elicit
feedback from students. These practical
examples have organized around a simple
principle that for feedback to really work
in your classroom it needs to be fast,
formative and frequent.

Feedback activities

There are lots of strategies that teachers

employ to ask a student to indicate
in some fashion whether or not they
understand a topic. However a much
more interesting question is How well
does the student understand the topic?
Indeed, getting students to indicate the
extent of their knowledge is an important
source of feedback because it helps
identify the gap between their exposure
to an idea or skill and their mastery of
this idea or skill. (Vygotsky 1978 p.86)

This is crucial because learners often

come to understand concepts in an
uneven way. Mastery develops over time
through trial and error and often comes
with lots of gaps. Sometimes it takes
students a long time to view learning in
this way.
For many students, exposure to an
idea is enough for them to feel that they
have mastered it but what they have
actually achieved is a kind of piecemeal
understanding that they would be unable
to apply in other situations. This lack of
conceptual understanding is sometimes
described as reaching a stage of
Approximated Competence.
If we are to transform student work
practices, we need to have strategies to
push them to work past this stage. We
must help our students see that being
wrong is not the opposite of being right
it is a step on the way to being right.

1. Fist to Five
An engaging activity to gauge the extent
of student knowledge is to use the Fist
to Five Convention. A teacher wanting
to ask a class about whether they should
move onto the next topic might typically
ask Does everyone understand this
now? Too often a handful of yeses
is taken as evidence that students are
across the detail of a concept or skill.
In this situation, it is much better to get
students to indicate the degree of their
understanding using Fist to Five.
Ask students to signal with one raised
hand the extent of their knowledge:

I dont understand.
A closed fist means they are still very unfamiliar with the concept or skill

I understand a little bit.

A single finger indicates that they have been introduced to an idea.

Im starting to understand it more.

Two fingers indicates that they still need substantial further practice or
explanation to come to an understanding.

I can understand it with help/I understand it for now.

Three fingers means that they have a good understanding of the current
example and should be able to apply it in some other context.

I know it and could do this again.

Four fingers means they understand it really well, and feel confident they
could apply it in other contexts.
I could teach someone else to do it.
Five fingers means they have mastered the concept/skill and would feel
confident teaching it to a peer.

2. Cheat Sheet
Summary
A good example of a fast formative
feedback activity that students can use
to demonstrate their learning is a Cheat
Sheet. A Cheat Sheet is a piece of blank
A4 paper that has been folded over twice
so that it is a quarter of its former size.
Students are then asked to synthesise
all their learning on a particular topic on
just the two sides of this folded sheet
(effectively half of one side of an A4
sheet).

Note: Primary students may find it

easier to use an A3 sheet.

3. Cheat Sheet Scramble

A Cheat Sheet Scramble is an engaging extension of a Cheat Sheet summary. In
this activity students display their work on their desks and the class takes some
time to carefully review each others efforts. To start a scramble:
Ask the students to open up their folded cheat sheets, so that both sides of
the summary are visible. Have them display these sheets on tables positioned
centrally in the room.
Tell students you are going to conduct a gallery session where the students
review each of the sheets and nominate which of them they find most helpful.
Once they have selected their favourite cheat sheet in the scramble, they then
identify it using stickers or labeled tokens (Classic labels include, This helps me,
Meets all criteria or Please copy this)
Once the class has identified particularly helpful model answers (typically three
or four sheets will get the most votes) the teacher asks class members why they
voted for a particular sheet.
The teacher might also talk to the students who created the most popular
sheets about the decisions they made in creating their cheat sheet.

NB It is important to note that some students may feel exposed during this
process. To protect these students, a cheat sheet scramble completed in
small groups might be more appropriate.

Feedback: Are we listening in schools? 13

4. Error Cluster
Learning is not only about understanding what you know, it is
also about identifying what you get wrong. In classrooms where
students see making mistakes as an important part of learning,
error and correction are routine elements of achieving success.
Ideally teachers create a culture in class where students are
unafraid to make mistakes and then be corrected. In these
classes, students are shown that ability is incremental rather
than fixed (Wiliams & Black 2009). In the best cases, this means
that students actively seek to identify their errors and report
them to the teacher as feedback. How can we encourage this
culture?
An Error Cluster Activity is an effective starting point for a
teacher wanting to create this culture in their classroom. It is
an emblematic example of the kinds of strategies you use to
get students used to the idea that correction is a source of
reflection that getting correction back is not the end of the
process, but a mid-way point to achieving their learning goals.
Asking students to explore the types of mistakes they make

helps students understand that rather than having made an

unrelated series of individual mistakes, they often make a small
range of types of errors. This is important because for teachers
and students alike it gives them the opportunity to see clearly
where the gaps are between teaching and learning.
1. In an error cluster activity, the student completes the
four following steps:
2. Compiles a list of the errors made in a test or assignment
using teacher or peer feedback.
3. Asks the teacher for an Error Cluster Activity Handout
and categorises the types of mistakes made according to
this sheet.
4. Examines the sheet to see which areas of work require
further review.
Were there types of mistakes that you made more
frequently than others?
5. Seeks teacher support to identify strategies that can be
used to avoid making this error in the future.

Sample handout Error Cluster Activity

Introduction

The Process

Last week you completed your parts of speech test and

then had the sheet corrected by me, (or peer corrected
by your study-buddy). These test results dont just tell me
how you performed on the assessment task; it can also
help you understand what to work on next to improve
your skills in this subject. To help you do this, we are
going to do a quick activity where you identify the types
of mistakes you made.

Please complete the following steps and then submit your

Error Cluster Activity Sheet to me as feedback.
Compile a list of the mistakes you made in the test. (was
it a verbs question, a noun question, etc?)
Use the Error Clusters Map below to indicate how many
of each type of mistake you made in the test.
Identify which types of mistakes you made most
frequently. Submit your sheet to me as feedback.

Year 8 Indonesian: Parts Of Speech Error Map

VERBS "batuk"

NOUNS "babi"

ADJECTIVES "bagus"

ADVERBS "tidak"

About
Glen Pearsall was a Leading Teacher at Eltham High and works throughout Australia as an educational consultant. He specialises in feedback,
instructional practice and teacher coaching. His books for teachers include Classroom Dynamics and the best-selling And Gladly Teach. These
can be ordered through the TLN Website at www.tln.org.au. He can be contacted at pea@elthamhs.vic.edu.au.

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