How to give effective feedback to students

Feedback for students doesn’t have to be an annotated script with a paragraph or two summarising strengths and weaknesses. In fact, the most effective feedback often happens during lessons, starting with “What do you think about this question?”

Asking a student to think through the question themselves gives you the opportunity to understand where they are struggling and guide them towards the next step, rather than simply telling them what they have done wrong.

That’s not to say written feedback doesn’t have its place. It can provide a useful record of a student’s progress and next steps, particularly when communicating with parents. But first, let’s explore the role of verbal feedback within lessons.

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Giving verbal feedback during lessons

The intention of verbal feedback should be to guide the student towards their own understanding of what’s next, both in relation to the question itself and in their own learning.

Some of my favourite rephrasings of “you’ve done this wrong” are:

1. You are currently on track for 5 marks out of 6. Why do you think there’s one missing?

2. “Are there any lines or phrases in the question that we haven’t currently used in our method?”

And my personal favourite:

3. “Is that a look of confusion, a look of processing, or a look of someone who wants me to ask again in a minute?”

The first is a great starting point for discussing rigour. For 5 marks, the solution itself must be correct, so have we missed something, or is there a condition for the answer (i.e., a particular form that we are currently ignoring)?

The second really helps students who are struggling with where to go next.

“Great, you’ve identified that a gradient and a y-intercept have been given, so you can form the equation of a line; let’s cross out those pieces of information in the question and see what’s left. Oh, a rogue pair of coordinates are still there, but we haven’t used them… What could we try to do next?”

Finally, my favourite line to ask a student is for them to explain where their head is currently at. If someone took a picture of me whilst doing difficult mental maths, confused about a statement or running through ideas in my head, all three would likely look like the same picture. It’s much better to give the student the option to say, “Yes, I’m stuck,” than to assume, because students self-identifying that they have nothing left to try is a fantastic skill. If you tell a student they are confused, however, they lose this ability to define that for themselves.

Providing written feedback to students

Written feedback is a powerful tool for both motivation and keeping a parent or guardian in the loop on their young person’s progress.

This type of feedback is particularly valuable because it’s permanent and visible. On PMT, written feedback is sent from the tutor to the parent and student after every session. So how do I personally utilise this?

An accurate record is useful for keeping all three of us in the loop. Specifics are super helpful, such as “we finished logarithms, focusing on the linearisation questions which are a common trope in past papers.”

Alongside the literal description of the lesson, statements like “they scored comfortably over half of the marks themselves but seemed demotivated by questions that they couldn’t finish” give both the parent and student an accurate view of performance and how the student seemed emotionally during the session.

Finally, pushing the motivation: “However, they shouldn’t be so hard on themselves, as three weeks ago we would see a score in the single digits across these questions. Their standard for themselves is much higher in recent sessions, which is a real sign of growth. They should be proud of their progress!”

Reporting student progress

Reporting progress is extremely important when providing feedback to students, as helping students move forward is our job as educators. Yes, sometimes topics are particularly troublesome for a student, but every lesson should be designed with some element of progress in mind, even if that is just gaining confidence in reading those question types or nailing one line of the recurrent method.

It also allows for a final “next steps” line of feedback for students and parents, such as “they should reattempt Question X from this lesson, followed by watching back my explanation again, to see if they have a better understanding. They should let me know at the start of the next lesson how this went.”

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Ultimately, verbal feedback guides and shapes the learning in the moment. Written feedback formalises, for everyone including you, what the student has achieved and what comes next in their learning journey.

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