Providing students with actionable feedback is one of the most powerful ways that educators can personalize instruction, invest students in completing their work with quality, and increase their odds of success in a virtual setting. But not all feedback is created equal, and when and how you deliver it can dramatically influence its effectiveness. In this session, we'll dig into the tips and tools that our best virtual instructors are using to provide their students with timely and effective feedback on their work.

In a brick-and-mortar classroom, it's easy to provide feedback and to see the instant impact, but when students are engaged in asynchronous learning, it's hard to read whether the feedback was even received or understood. And depending on how you deliver feedback, it can become one of the most time-consuming aspects of virtual teaching.

To build a common language around feedback, we'll name the two most common types that virtual instructors use in an asynchronous setting. The first type, "Delayed Feedback," might sound like this: "Write your answers in your packet, and I'll check those later today." Essentially, it's when the teacher provides feedback after an undetermined delay in time. This is a good strategy because it lets you assign tasks of substance and merit, but the time lag can be problematic. Students could tune out or labor with misconceptions all lesson long and you’d never know it.

Another useful approach I see teachers use is "Implicit Feedback." This is feedback that comes in the form of checking one's work against an exemplar, rubric, or established criteria of success. It might sound something like, “Try to jot down definitions to these terms in your notes. In a moment I’ll share the answers & you can compare yours to mine.” In this scenario, students are on their honor. We hope that they do the task and diligently compare their answers with ours. But there may be a disparate impact. Some may not do the tasks. Others may feel tempted to let the video roll and wait for the teacher’s answer. This can be especially true online, where kids are prone to more distractions and less direct engagement from the teacher.

So which type of feedback is intrinsically better? Neither of them. Choosing is a matter of when and why. More than likely, students will enjoy the most benefit when teachers provide them with a healthy, balanced diet of both.

Being aware of these two types--and their inherent benefits and limitations--opens the door for us to seek new and better ways to give feedback in a virtual space. In this session, we'll explore the tips and tools that teachers are using to do that.

There are a number of ways that you can shrink the "delay" in your feedback, and make it timelier and more efficient to give students. Here are five of the most promising best practices:

Tip #1: Avoid Repetitive Feedback with a "Comment Bank"

Tip #2: Respond to Common Trends with "Batched Feedback"

Tip #3: Use Virtual "Feedback Codes"

Tip #4: Automate Your Feedback

Tip #5: Embed Just-in-Time Supports

Some teachers, like Kyle Perez-Robinson, streamline the process of checking for understanding by standardizing the format of the feedback they give students. On asynchronous work, Kyle sometimes gives students written feedback using shorthand codes like the ones shown below (See: Example 2). With a single key, Kyle can efficiently provide students with actionable feedback. This allows her to give more feedback to more students in less time, while putting the onus on students to determine how they will correct their work.

Ashley Michelson adds a clever and useful twist to this concept of feedback codes (See: Example 3). Unlike the math example above, which targets procedural errors, Ashley uses her codes as shorthand for more robust, conceptual feedback. The detail she provides in her feedback increases the odds that students will be able to grasp and apply it. Ashley also includes a follow-up task to hold students accountable for demonstrating understanding of their mistake. (e.g., "Your comment should explain how you know which one is x and which one is y").

One of the biggest limitations of teacher feedback in an asynchronous setting is the perceived inevitability of "the delay." And as you may have heard me share at PDs, study after study on feedback has shown that the longer you delay feedback, the less impactful it is on the learner. An easy way that teachers get around this is by automating their feedback with tools like Google Forms or EdPuzzle. Example 4 illustrates what this looks like on EdPuzzle. With "Instant Feedback," teachers can embed explanations for correct and incorrect answers. So, if a student responds with a wrong answer, EdPuzzle will reveal the correct answer as well as the explanation for why their answer was wrong. Although it's not quite as targeted and precise as real time feedback from an actual teacher, it's better than waiting hours or even days for delayed feedback.

If you're finding that more than 20% of students' responses contain the SAME (or a similar) gap or error, then it's probably worth addressing with "batched feedback" (Note: this is NOT the same as saying that 20% of students are getting it wrong for a variety of reasons.) "Batched feedback" works best for situations where you want to avoid giving the same feedback to student. It's the "teaching" equivalent of the "comment bank" that we discussed as part of Tip #1.

One of the best attributes of "Implicit Feedback" is that it requires students to take ownership of their learning. It assumes that, when given the time and resources, students will do the hard work of learning and avoid potential shortcuts. This may be true of many of our students, but for those who struggle academically, or who lack the self-confidence needed to persist in the face of a really challenging task, it's easy to envision some kids skipping the task altogether.

One way to nudge these students to persist in the face of such challenges is to anticipate those misconceptions and then insert "just-in-time" supports that are designed to help them overcome those. At the bottom of Example 6, you'll see an excellent example of such supports. Michelle Leon anticipated where her students might struggle, and then provides them with tips, hints, or video guidance they'll need to successfully complete those.

One way to mitigate the shortcomings of generic rubrics or Criteria for Success is to make them more task-specific. Research shows that students who tend to struggle academically are much better at implementing Criteria for Success that's tailored to the lesson task at hand (See: Example 8). The example below illustrates the difference between more generic criteria (e.g., Evidence, Reasoning, etc.) and task-specific criteria (e.g., Instead of just saying "Use at least one piece of evidence..." Vicki clarifies that in the context of this task, this means: "Describes which fuel caused the balloon to increase in diameter at a faster rate"). To make the bar for excellence even clearer, consider embedding responses at different levels and then asking students to use the rubric or CFS to identify what makes one more effective than the other.