Feedback During Independent Work

Immediate, actionable, and... whole-class?

What happens in your room when kids turn classwork in?

I think it’s fairly important something happens right away.

People learn best when feedback is immediate. With a delay of even one day, they must work to remember the task and the thinking required to complete it before they can process our feedback. That’s treacherous, relying on memory, but it’s necessary for understanding delayed feedback. Even if students seem to “get” the feedback, poor memory of the original work might mean they actually don’t. Handing back written comments a day later is not good enough. Returning math problems with checks and circled errors the next day is mostly pointless; students have already mostly forgotten the problems and what they were thinking about when they solved them. Cognitive effort has a short shelf-life; feedback must be quick. Don’t let thinking rot.

Independent practice should always involve feedback that is immediate and actionable. How do we do this?

Always Be Checking

During independent practice in class, I am constantly checking work. This means, as much as possible, I’m limiting the time I spend answering questions, re-explaining concepts, or managing behavior. I am providing praise and feedback: telling kids to address a missing word, clarify a sentence, further explain their evidence, take another look at their place value, or go back and make common denominators before adding. I want to catch mistakes as quickly as possible, so students can correct them and practice the right thing rather than replicate errors. And I want to praise good stuff quickly so they are more likely to do it again.

Giving immediate feedback requires the teacher to know exactly what excellence looks like. We need to know exactly what we want so we can immediately recognize and praise it or tell students how to improve their work. We also need to know exactly what we want so that we can teach it in the first place.

Dedicating ourselves to giving praise and actionable feedback can be tricky because there are so many other things to get distracted by: answering questions, preemptively helping students, or managing behavior.

Strong explicit teaching before giving an independent task is critical here. If I anticipate kids will need help or have many questions, it’s likely independent practice is not yet appropriate. Sometimes, I send them off to work and realize it was a mistake, so I’ll bring us back altogether and re-teach. If a single student asks a question, they’re rarely the only one who has it. They’re just the first who ventured to ask. I tend to answer individual questions for the whole class to hear. We should aim to avoid answering the same question twice.

If a student needs help, they’re rarely the only one confused. They’re just the first I noticed. It’s a terrible mistake to spend minutes and minutes helping a single confused student only to finally go check others’ work and find several of them were toiling away completely lost, making the same mistakes. We really want to check everyone’s work and give everyone some feedback before getting too into the weeds with individuals. Making sure from the start that everyone is ready to work independently is critical.

Everyone being able to do the task will also help quite a bit with behavior, but we shouldn’t not rely on engagement to keep the classroom calm and working. Independent work is an important routine to teach and target with the Good Behavior Game early in the year and then periodically throughout. This routine will involve how students should talk, if at all, how long they will be working for, and what they should do when they think they are finished.

During independent practice, we are teaching with actionable feedback and reinforcement, not explanation. Feedback and reinforcement will clarify for students what our previous explanations actually meant.

Give Whole Class Feedback

A constant in my classroom is student work going under the document camera and the whole class talking through it. This tends to happen either in the middle or end of work time. When all students fully participate in everything, their strengths and needs converge over the course of the year. The strongest individual performances on a given task should be attainable to the rest of the students in the coming days or weeks. Peer exemplars crystalize what qualities they should aim for in their own work. Similarly, weaknesses and misconceptions tend to be shared mainly because they’re an artifact of things I overlooked or poorly taught in the first place. I will correct and praise the work, along with actionable steps for how the author can improve its weaknesses or how their classmates might imitate its strengths.

Imagine we are working on supporting literary claims with textual evidence, specifically how we introduce quotes from our book.

“Here they introduce their evidence with context from the story: ‘Charlotte is spinning another web to help Wilbur when Wilbur says, [xyz]’ Look at yours and make you are introducing your evidence with context as well.”

Or it may be a bit more involved.

“Ok, here they said, ‘In chapter 7, on page 64...’ That was great back in October, but we're pushing ourselves to do more now. What happened in chapter 7 that we can add to give more context? Forty seconds to look back in your book and think of a summary phrase.”

They flip through their book.

“Ok, turn to your partner and share what you came up with.”

Students turn and share their ideas.

“Ok! Let’s hear some.”

I write down a list under the document camera with their suggestions.

“These are great. This is how we want to introduce evidence in our arguments. It helps the reader understand where the quote comes from.”

I like to make feedback actionable as often as possible because it’s important that students actually understand it, and making them act on it is the best way to check if they do. Can the student actually implement the feedback correctly?

At the end of a work period, there is less possibility for making feedback actionable because there will not be time to implement it, but seeing peer exemplars is valuable. I like to collect everyone’s work and then quickly select several to go through under the projector, usually just highlighting a strong thing or two from each. Sometimes, these strengths will be directly related to our focus; other times, they will be older teaching points or related merits. In writing, it might be vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, neatness, humor, or a turn of phrase.

“Wow: ‘considerate’. A great word to describe Opal in this scene.”

“A nice opening sentence here: ‘My favorite thing about school vacation is annoying my sister.’ It surprises us because it’s almost what we're expecting, but then it's not. We're reading along, and it's almost like a boring sentence, but then it has a twist at the end. So, it makes us sit up and pay attention to the rest of the story. You can experiment with sentences like this, too.”

“We have to line up for Music in just a minute, but let’s look at a few more. Oh, look at this! So much detail Taylor has here.”

This is a sharp tool for nudging the norms of the whole class forward.

Curate Classroom Culture

Whole-class feedback also helps build a culture of appreciation and respect. We can explicitly teach students to identify admirable things in all of their peers’ work. Without this, they are often left just reinforcing their preexisting perceptions. They may even just default to thinking fast finishers are the smartest in their class. In the absence of regular interaction with peer exemplars, seeing when peers stand up to turn things in may be the main source of data that informs their perceptions of their academic performance and abilities.

To that end, it is fantastic to make these moments reflective and interactive. We can ask the class to notice something the author has done very well or tell them to identify something they could try in their own writing. Positive feedback should come constantly from us, but it’s even better when students reinforce each other. Adding deliberate opportunities for this into our daily instructional routines helps build a culture where informal praise and appreciation flow easily.

Immediate feedback is important for learning; it also helps strengthen motivation. In both cases, it should come immediately after the antecedent effort. If we want kids to learn how to work hard, we need to teach that the same way we’d teach any behavior: make it routine, highlight peer models of it, and reinforce students when they do it. Students should know: when I work hard, my effort will be celebrated.

Learning to reading is a great model for how we want our teaching to work. When students decode an unfamiliar word, they are able to pronounce it and realize it’s a word in their spoken vocabulary. That’s immediate feedback! It’s why orthographic mapping of unfamiliar words can happen with so few decoding attempts. Other subjects miss these pre-constructed feedback loops. It’s our job to build them.