“Much Feedback Is Not Fit For Purpose – And We’ve Known It For Decades”
Pupils need to be told how they're progressing, says Jon Berry – but when the OECD finds your teaching administration to be among the most onerous in the world, it's surely time to change how we go about providing feedback…
- by Jon Berry
It’s the curse of the modern age – whether it’s booking a ticket online or buying a pot of paint in your local DIY store, someone wants you to give them ‘feedback’. I decided some time ago not to engage in this charade on the grounds that responding only encourages them. Maybe I’m just getting old and grumpy. But then I shouldn’t really be so opposed to this notion, having given feedback to students of various sorts for over 40 years. It’s perfectly proper to let people know how they’re getting on and whether you think they’re making progress. Good assessment also depends on supplying prompts and ideas about how individuals might do even better in the future.
So it’s unfortunate that neither pressing a smiley face after you’ve been through airport security, nor jotting a target and adding a cheery sticker on a child’s work actually does a worthwhile job…
‘What d’ja get?’
I am not arguing against marking children’s work. What I am saying is that much feedback – and this applies to everything from primary school to undergraduate marking – is not fit for purpose. What’s more, we’ve known this for decades.
Early on in my teaching career, I took weary note of how, when I handed books back to pupils, instead of looking at what I hoped were helpful and illuminating comments, the kids would glance at the mark, ask their mates ‘What d’ja get?’ and that was that. I’d like to be able to report that times have changed, but a recent piece of research on how undergraduates respond to commentary on their work seems to show that the problem remains deep-seated.
And now we have an OECD report that tells us – who knew? – that teachers in England are happy to put time and energy into teaching, but that the weight of administration and marking is more onerous here than in almost anywhere else in the world.
I suggest that there are two things we can do about this.
Quality of drudgery
First, as teachers, parents – and yes, government ministers – we can try to put an end to the obsessive regime of measurement and data generation that has bedevilled the lives of young people for the last 25 years. We all know how this plays out on a daily basis; frequent and regular tests, the point of which are not to gauge how much a child has learnt, but to ensure that a dubious target has been met and ticked off.
Ask practically any teacher in the English system (and I’ve spoken to hundreds in the course of my research) and they will tell you, almost to a woman and a man, that this constant quizzing impedes, rather than enhances learning.
Second, we need to think much more carefully about how we, as teachers, give this feedback. It is now nearly 20 years since Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam’s influential work on assessment [PDF] confirmed that watching, listening and speaking with young people as they learnt was by far the best way to see how they were getting on. It goes without saying that such feedback requires the time and space that a crowded and piecemeal curriculum cannot accommodate – which is yet another battle for us educators to fight!
In the final analysis, it’s a matter of quality over drudgery. We can cultivate proper learning dialogue between teachers and pupils at all levels – or we can needlessly tire people out by asking them to slog through hours of meaningless ticking and flicking which is fleetingly noticed, and then blithely ignored.
Like I say, as a citizen, I’ve renounced meaningless feedback. As a profession, we might think about doing so too.
Jon Berry’s book, Teachers Undefeated available now via Amazon. To order multiple copies, contact the author at j.berry@herts.ac.uk
