Home        Learn More        Standards        Inspiration        About the Author

EFFECTIVE FEEDBACK:
Could asking 3 simple questions jumpstart students into reaching their goals?

This is an inspiring video from researcher John Hattie who asks teachers the most relevant question in our profession:  "Do you know your impact?"  Using data from pre and post assessments that shows that students improved is NOT a valid measurement.  His message to teachers is almost everything teachers do has a positive impact on student achievement. The key is to know the size of the impact. ​The average effect size of feedback on achievement is .79 which is twice the average effect! This places feedback among the top ten influences on achievement.
The key is how to provide feedback without  praise and judgement (No more "Good job!", right?). Hattie suggests truly effective feedback must help students answer the 3 questions above.  My goal was to assist students in monitoring their own learning process and I decided that my students might not understand those reflective questions so I created my own set of 3 questions which mirror Hattie's. 
After my students created their own visual graph with their own reading scores, they used the reflective graphic organizer below.
Picture
Click on the image above to link to a super quick website to create your own graphic organizer and questions. Feel free to use mine by downloading the file below.
y_chart.pdf
File Size: 2 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File
Picture
GROWTH MINDSET
Picture
VISUAL GRAPH
Picture
REFERENCES

DATA CONVERSATIONS

Initially, I sat with each student individually with this worksheet and their own graph in front of them.  I wrote down bullet point notes about what we talked about.  In subsequent months, students answered the feedback questions themselves and then discussed them with me.
  1. "What do you notice?"  Students at first were placing value judgement on their scores ("I'm doing bad" or "I'm not trying hard enough"). I found it helpful to actually cover up their name at the top and ask them to pretend these were someone else's scores and tell me what they noticed.  They were then able to see the scores more objectively.
  2. "Why might that be?" This was an eye opening question for me because I told them that they were the only ones who could truly answer that question.  I discovered students were really honest and were able to provide possible reasons for why their scores either increased or decreased.
  3. "What is your goal to grow by____?"  Sometimes students had unrealistic expectations for their growth goals in one month.  I helped them to focus on one or two specific areas and set a measurable goal ("My goal is to increase my lexile score by 90 points.") This also made it super exciting the next month when they saw whether they reached their goal or not!