Okay, so we can’t put everything you need to know about feedback and assessment in one blog post. But many of us at TPTC are former teachers or have worked in schools and we have lots of advice we want to share about giving feedback in the classroom! So we’ve put together a few ideas that we think can really help to both improve the real learning going on in your classroom, and save you some time on admin and marking. We’re going to look at how to set and use success criteria effectively, how to incorporate student self-assessment into your lessons, and how to give whole class feedback. Let’s go!
Effective Success Criteria
Learning how to set and use learning objectives and success criteria is so helpful for students to really engage with their lessons. This can really help to improve their learning and help you to give more effective and more streamlined feedback. The key is to use them properly: make them meaningful, and use them effectively during the lesson. Don’t just write your success criteria because you have to, read them off the board, and then leave them. Really use them, and then assess against them!
First – make sure the Learning Objective is a skill. Introduce it as a goal your students will hopefully reach by the end of the lesson. This will help to get them focused and understand why they are doing the lesson today; what skill are they going to gain? Then, break it down into Success Criteria. Make these practical things that your students can do in order to be able to achieve the Learning Objective. Explain this all to the students – look at how each of the success criteria will help to build their skills. You could even write the success criteria together, depending on the lesson.
For example – in a history lesson, the students are looking at lots of different pieces of evidence and primary sources around a local historical event. The Learning Objective is to ‘give evidence from different sources’. This is a practical skill, and one they can apply to lots of different things, not just this one lesson. The Success Criteria are:
- Sort evidence into categories
- Use sentence stems to bring your ideas to the group
- Use sentence stems to respond to the opinions of others
- Use evidence to back up your findings
Each of these success criteria is a practical thing that they can do, practice, and get support with throughout the lesson, and will ultimately contribute to their ability to give evidence from different sources.
So what do you do with your success criteria? Refer to them throughout the lesson. Be explicit about what tasks or activities apply to each success criteria. Put them in order – which will you do first? How does the next one build upon that? Check in at different points and refer back to them, which ones have they done already? Did they have any trouble? What are they working on now? Get your students to really engage with them to help give their work real meaning.
These will then help you when you give feedback, and you can assess against each of the specific success criteria. Each one was practical and specific, so you’ll be able to see in their task whether they have achieved each one, or if there was one in particular they needed support with. Using lesson objectives and success criteria in this way give a good structure against which you can mark, and will streamline the process. If you use them in this way, engaging the students and referring back to them throughout the lesson, then you’ll have a good idea of how the lesson went and won’t have to spend to long pondering on how each student did when it comes time to mark and give feedback.
Self-Assessment
Incorporating self-assessment into your lessons is a great way for students to focus their learning and really engage with their lessons. You’ll hear about ‘self-assessment’ a lot while you’re training; TPTC Founder Rachel says that during her training, it was a bit of a buzzword. The key with self-assessment is to make it effective, so let’s talk about how.
Firstly, you need to write effective learning objectives and success criteria, like we discussed above. Make each point practical and specific, so the students can relate to them and see what they’re going to be learning and what skills they’ll use. Explain them properly, refer back to them, really familiarise the students with them.
When it comes to self-assessment, it can be easier to write appropriate success criteria with subjects like maths, but more tricky with things like writing tasks. When you’re working on self-assessment, just ask them to focus on one specific part – like whether they have chosen pairs of rhyming words for poetry, whether they have used capital letters appropriately, or whether they have included adjectives.
Here’s the thing: self-assessment is a skill. Your students won’t know how to do it straight away, you’ll need to teach them and then they’ll need to practice. So to start out, go through each piece of self-assessment criteria and have them just look out for that one thing in their own work. Do it in steps, one small thing at a time, until they’ve done it. At first, you might just do this with one piece of success criteria for each lesson.
You’ll need to do this over many lessons and guide them through it. Make sure to model it – show them an example of how to do it. At first, you might feel like you’re getting nowhere, but over time they will develop the skill and you’ll be able to do more and more. If you invest the time, you’ll reach a point where, partway through a lesson, you can say ‘I’d like you to self-assess against the first point in the success criteria’ and they’ll be able to do it.
Self-assessment is a skill in itself, and you need to invest time and effort into modelling and teaching your students how to do it – but it can really pay off over time!
Whole Class Feedback
Whole class feedback is often really under-utilised, but it can be a great tool for assessment and feedback and can save you a lot of time. Rather than giving individual feedback to each child in your class, you can use group feedback – we recommend using our Feedback and Assessment pad for this. You can keep it for your records, show it on the board, or photocopy the sheet and stick it in the students’ books.
There are lots of different things you can give feedback on about a lesson. You could note down a common misconception or error that was made, with an explanation or some support the students needed in order to overcome this. When this is on the whole class feedback sheet, the students can reflect on their work and think about whether they made this misconception. If they did, did they get it cleared up in the lesson? If not, the support they need is there on the feedback sheet. You can also include things like common spelling errors or presentation issues, and the students can look back on their work to self-assess and see if they had these issues.
You can also include some next steps, and make this a variety of things in terms of skills and knowledge needed, so one of these next steps will apply to each of the children. Depending on what your lesson was like, there are different ways that children could see what their next steps are. You could say there are Next Step A, B, and C, and tell each child which is theirs. Or it could depend on how far through a worksheet the student got. Maybe they could even self-assess and think about which next step they feel is appropriate.
Like with self-assessment, they’ll need to be taught how to best use this feedback. You can model how to read the feedback and apply it to their own work – did they make the misconception you highlighted? Do they still need help with it? Check back over common mistakes you found such as with presentation issues or spelling errors.
We hope you found these ideas helpful – we’d love to know how you incorporate feedback and assessment into your classrooms!
