Contributions from Teaching Approaches by John Hattie

Feedback is an important aspect of teaching that supports and furthers student learning and understanding. Though it’s valued by educators, feedback often requires a great deal of preparation in order to be effective. Its power diminishes as teachers struggle to find adequate time to administer it and students fail to understand its use. In Visible Learning, John Hattie examines principles for providing effective feedback that can facilitate the process for both teachers and students. We draw upon Hattie’s writing, along with our own experience at Eskolta, to provide three key insights and strategies for giving the most effective feedback.

Feedback should be reciprocal. Often we think of feedback as provided by teachers to their students. Surprisingly, however, research has shown that although nearly “70 percent of teachers claimed they provided … detailed feedback often or always” to students, “only 45 percent of students agreed with their teachers’ claims.” According to Hattie, feedback needs to be viewed as something that is provided to both teacher and students by each other in order to make “teaching and learning” not only “synchronized and powerful” but “visible” as well. To do this, intertwine feedback and instruction by incorporating formative assessments into lessons that ask students to surface their misunderstandings. Teachers can use this information to gain insight on where lessons may have been unclear and what kind of targeted support students may need.

Tie feedback directly and clearly to objectives. Hattie explains that in order for feedback to be effective, it “needs to provide information specifically relating to the task or process of learning that fills between what is understood and what is aimed to be understood.” To do this, Hattie suggests guiding students to ask themselves three questions: Where am I going? How am I going? Where to next? This series of questions allows students to understand the overall goals of the assignment, to assess their own progress toward those goals, and to outline steps required to meet those goals. This strategy supports another crucial lesson in Hattie’s findings: providing feedback should not be about giving rewards, but rather about providing information related to the task.

Be intentional about the rationale for giving feedback. Finally, before providing feedback, Hattie recommends identifying the overall purpose of feedback so that it is clear how it should be used. To do this, Hattie recommends breaking feedback into four levels: the task level, which focuses on “how well tasks are understood/performed”; the process level, which looks at “the process needed to understand and perform tasks”; the self-regulation level, which relates to students’ “self-monitoring” as they perform tasks; and the self level (or personal level), which Hattie argues “is too often unrelated to performance on the task.” One way to facilitate feedback at the task, process, and self-regulation levels is to incorporate video and audio into the classroom. Teachers can record full-class discussions or other performance tasks and support students to self-assess and reflect on their performance using rubrics aligned to the task objectives.

 

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Hattie, J. (2009). The contributions from teaching approaches—part I. In Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement (1st ed., pp. 173–178). London; New York: Routledge.

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