Responding to Feedback

Feedback can be split into four different categories:

  • Appreciation: Where were you most successful? What improvements stand out? What deserves credit or affirmation?
  • Coaching: How can knowledge expand? What skills need tweaked or fine-tuned? Where does effort need to be increased or reallocated?
  • Feed-forward: What needs to change or stay the same to be successful? How does behavior need to change to align with desired outcomes? How can experience inform decision-making?
  • Criticism: Often a personal attack and suggestions have very little consideration about how you can grow as a learner. This is the least helpful of methods.

Feedback can be made by:

  • Teacher
  • Self
  • Peer

And can be recorded in many ways:

  • Verbally
  • Written
  • Graded Papers
  • School Report

When receiving feedback from your teacher or peers decide which method they are using? Then read or listen to the feedback carefully. Understand it, process it, talk it through with the teacher.

Feedback is only worthwhile if it is acted upon. Take the work away and in your own time make corrections. Use the following 5 R's of 'action' feedback as a guide.

1. Redraft or Re-do

Redrafting is very powerful provided that the actions are very specific and the scale of the task is manageable in the time available.

2. Rehearse or Repeat

This can also be called practise. As any musician will know, the feedback from most instrumental lessons is to practise something specific: i.e. scales for additional fluency. This could work for many subjects where you need to do lots of the same type of questions to consolidate your understanding before being challenged with a wider variety.

3. Revisit and Respond

Very simply, this means ‘do these questions’. It means, on the basis of what I’m seeing, you need more practice answering questions like this. It could mean going back over fundamentals or being given extension questions.

4. Re-learn and Re-test

This is a case of specifying a set of knowledge and returning to the routines of retrieval practice. You may need to re-visit previous learning too but mainly it is a case of self-quizzing repeatedly using a variety of memory techniques to ensure certain ideas, words, equations, facts, details, quotations – are learned.

5. Research and Record

Here, you may have some issues with the scope of your ideas and are showing the need to develop deeper insight, wider references and more imagination. The solution to this could be more wider reading around the topic or more research of a different kind. Ask your teacher to specify what reading should be done or where exactly you should research. You must record your findings.

Making Corrections

In the image here you can see that a teacher has marked some class work in blue pen. The student has been given a clear 'Revisit and Respond' style comment. Below the student has extended their answer to address the teachers concerns. They have increased their understanding.

Corrections should be made near to the teacher comment.

More importantly use this feedback to improve the quality of your written work next time you complete a similar task in any subject area.

Feedback is not just relevant to that subject. Skills are transferable between subjects.

"I try not to make the same mistakes today that I made yesterday"

Receiving feedback can often feel like criticism, listen to this expert advice on how to select which elements of the feedback you take on board.