5. Giving Effective Feedback

“Feedback to any pupil should be about the particular qualities of his or her work, with advice on what he or she can do to improve, and should avoid comparisons with other pupils. Feedback has shown to improve learning where it gives each pupil specific guidance on strengths and weaknesses, preferably without any overall marks.”

         “Feedback is the information communicated to a student in regard to their understanding of shared learning objectives of a given task against an agreed set of criteria.” This information will include guidance on how to improve. Moreover, feedback is the information that is relayed to the student about their progress and can be based upon a variety of forms of evidence including: marked work, un-graded teacher checked worked, oral contribution, practical displays, draft work and re-drafted work.

        Traditionally in education, feedback has been given by a letter grade on a paper. An “A” student will often continue to be an “A” student throughout his/her educational career. Likewise, students who see themselves as academic failures become discouraged by continually seeing failing grades on their assignments and often will give up on learning. The power of using effective feedback in the classroom has the potential to change a student with the mindset that they are a failure, into a student who believes that success is possible and that they can achieve far more than they ever thought they could. 

      Giving feedback to students is an essential part in teaching; as teachers, we need to look for the best words so that our students do not misinterpret what we say. Our comments must be phrased positively. Furthermore, we need to focus on looking for the ways to improve learning and we need to focus on helping them know what they need to do to become better students. Moreover, feedback is most effective when it is delivered promptly and reflection time is planned into the lesson to allow students time to respond to the comment and if possible act upon it immediately. By delaying feedback students forget the original purpose of the work and the challenges they faced when completing it. The impact of prompt, criteria based feedback on selected pieces of work will have greater long-term impact on a student’s learning and their results and it is of greater benefit than an inadequate attempt to mark everything in detail at irregular intervals.

“Effective feedback encourages students´ motivation, growth, and independent thinking.”

4. The purposes of teacher´s classroom questions.

Questioning . . . led to richer discourse, in which the teachers evoked a wealth of information from which to judge the current level of understanding of their students. More importantly, they had evidence on which to plan the next steps in learning so the challenge and pace of lessons could be directed by formative assessment evidence rather than simply following a prescribed agenda.

 Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall and Wiliam (2003)

        Questioning serves many purposes such as helping teachers to assess students´ knowledge and making students be active learners. Questioning is a means of developing and extending student dialogue and it is an essential tool for both teaching and learning.

        Teachers ask questions for many reasons, ranging from less demanding comprehension and recall questions to synthesis and evaluation questions making greater cognitive demands of the student. We, teachers, need to be actively asking questions to our students so that we realize how much they know about the topic we are teaching, but most importantly students must be actively participating in the classroom. Furthermore, by answering questions, students have the opportunity to openly express their ideas and thoughts; moreover, by asking questions to our students, we get to know their strengths and weaknesses. Based on this, we can look for the best ways to help our students get over their weaknesses, and help them increase their knowledge.

 

        Questions need to be prepared in advance of a lesson in order to ensure that lesson objectives can be met. The lesson objectives therefore need to go beyond a content based delivery and focus on the skills and concepts that students are aiming to develop. When objectives are clearly defined effective use of questioning can be made to secure student understanding in this area. Planning is essential, as is the strategic use of questioning with students and finally the following consolidation of learning which follows in subsequent lessons. A range of question stems to support different phases of learning are suggested below and can be applied to most subject areas.

Knowledge and Comprehension.

Who . . .? Which . . .? When . . .? What . . .?

Application and Analysis.

Why . . .? How else . . .? What effect . . .?

Synthesis and Evaluation.

How far . . .? What if . . .? How similar . . .?

3. Assessment in education must, first and foremost, serve the purpose of supporting learning.

Formative assessment is defined as . . . frequent, interactive assessments of student progress and understanding to identify learning needs and adjust teaching appropriately.

          The purpose of assessment must be of supporting learning. Assessment can help teachers determine what their students know and can do. Then, this information helps teachers decide what to teach. In addition, assessment can help teachers determine how their students learn, and this information helps teachers decide how to teach.

          Based on students’ previous knowledge, teachers will be able to know what they will teach, and in that way students will find the connection with the previous information. For instance, if we are going to teach the future continuous tense to a group of students, they must have been taught the present continuous tense previously.

           Furthermore, assessment for learning can allow teachers to know and guide all their students as individual learners. As we teachers know, every single student is different. We, teachers, must focus on how students learn best. Each student has a different learning style, and we must look for a variety of activities to carry out in the classroom so that all students benefit from these activities. Finding and applying the most suitable activities for each learning style are part of effective planning.

           Finally, assessment for learning is most effective when its many aspects become integral to everyday teaching and learning and make up a framework of student classroom provision. This is not an overnight shift and requires patience, commitment and professional learning on the part of the teacher.

2. Encouraging students to be independent learners

  

          Independent learning requires more than token gestures to ‘working by oneself’. It requires planning, structure and guidance. There are certain techniques we teachers need to take into account when helping students learn independently. “Teaching ‘independence’ appears to be a paradox. If a teacher provides a structure for learning, by definition they are removing an element of independent study yet if a teacher leaves a student to survive autonomously, the teacher is negating their responsibility to enable the student to learn. Independent learning is open to interpretation depending on the level of independence a teacher wishes to instil in his/her students.” 

        We, teachers need to look for the most interesting approaches and strategies to make our students take responsibility for their own learning. Also, teachers must make their students understand they need to learn for life. Most of the time students get use to the teacher ‘spoon-feeding’, but this is something we need to avoid when teaching. The intentions of the teacher can be good when spoon-feeding contents, but he loses sight of the creativity, and the students become passive and teacher-dependent learners. Students’ dependency on the teacher restricts their ability to act and think independently about their subject and their learning. We need to make our students to do some research about certain topics so that they can learn by themselves. Moreover, we need to help our students develop their skills to the fullest. Knowing how to get students to this end point becomes a crucial part of short, medium and long-term planning and most importantly planning for progression. It requires a teacher to look beyond their immediate course of study, and to have a clear idea on where the he or she wants the students to be in the future.

        Scaffolding is used in the context of a technique designed to support a student’s transition in becoming independent learners. We have to help them till they are ready to do things by themselves. This will impact on a student`s ability to become an independent learner. A student`s capacity to be able to learn on their own can be maximized through effective co-planning of this time by both teacher and student. 

   

1. Creating a positive and challenging learning environment through interesting and innovative strategies

   

     Teachers need to challenge students through interesting and innovative strategies to develop their skills. The book “Captivating Your Class Effective Teaching Skills” presents a series of interesting strategies that we can use in the classroom to challenge our students and to create a positive learning environment. For instance, there is a strategy in which each individual has a given number of talk tokens that they have to use within a discussion. These talk tokens can be used to make the whole class participate. For a talkative student who can be prone to dominate the discussion they will have to think before they talk and use their tokens wisely. They will hopefully become wise with their words and think much more before they talk. For a quiet student, having to speak can be an intimidating and overwhelming experience and the teacher needs to be sensitive in handling these students. Carrying out this strategy can be challenging for both talkative and quiet students, but it will create a positive learning environment in the classroom.

     

       Furthermore, students must be active learners “Speaking in a classroom should be a participatory event.” All students in a classroom must have the same opportunities to speak; and teachers need to ensure that everyone in the classroom participates. Here, Interesting and innovative strategies play an important role in the classroom. Discussion, for example, is an interesting strategy in which all the students are involved. “Students have to be involved in their learning through interaction and physical activity rather than passive listening and reading. “

       Unquestionably, we teachers need to think about our students’ needs and different learning styles so that we can use the most appropriate strategies in the classroom. By doing so, we will challenge our students to do their best.