A recognised challenge for school leaders has always been how to ensure that students receive frequent and consistently high-quality feedback, without compromising the integrity of the subject or limiting the creativity and expertise of curriculum leaders. How can we blend the two so that there is consistency without conformity and high expectations without unrealistic generic requirements?
The consensus of thinking around feedback itself has moved on considerably in the last few years. If I was writing this blog at the start of my career (and perhaps somewhat more recently than that) I would have been referring to a “Marking Policy”. However, thankfully the educational rhetoric has moved on from “marking” students work, especially in the literal sense of actually taking a pen and making a “mark”. This is a momentous positive step because for teachers to physically mark student's individual work is hugely time consuming and often an incredibly ineffective use of their time, although there are of course occasions where it is necessary and justified. I don’t plan to labour the point here about what feedback should look like, there are many educationalists like @teacherhead @JGProfDev @MrsBallAP @m_chiles and @claresealy who have covered feedback strategies and techniques in some incredible books and blogs. Books and blogs in fact, which as a team we have read to improve our whole school understanding of feedback and its effective use.
Instead, I will consider how these improvements in our understanding of effective feedback, affect senior leaders in their plight to ensure consistently high standards of feedback across vastly different subjects and phases in a typical secondary school. Teacher feedback to students in the classroom has beyond doubt improved significantly, but have the whole school “policies” or “guidance” (whatever you choose to call them) kept pace? Historically a “marking policy” would probably indicate a frequency and likely a structure for feedback e.g., books will be marked by the teacher every fortnight and include a WWW and EBI, and although this approach is peppered with flaws, it did allow leaders to easily establish if students were receiving the expected amount of feedback across a range of subjects and feedback could be compared to some minimum standards.
However, we now find ourselves in the golden age of research led practice, and we have finally acknowledged as a profession that teachers lugging piles of books home every night to mark them is not the most effective use of their time. We know there is in fact a range of possible ways to give arguably better feedback and in a much more time efficient way. But where does that leave senior leaders when trying to quality assure the experience of learners across subjects in their academy?
In order to address this disparity, we developed a feedback approach which consists of “core principles” and a set of “guidelines” which are generic enough to meet the needs of all subject areas (documents shared below) but also clearly identify what best practice for feedback looks like in our academy. These guidelines were not created in isolation and involved middle and senior leaders in every stage of their development to ensure that the needs of all subject specialisms and groups of learners had been considered. The documents themselves use phrases like “In-depth feedback will be provided regularly for every student in every subject” and “Defined tasks will receive feedback which are determined in the subject curriculum plan”. These statements alone of course have their limitations, as words like “regularly” are highly subjective and specifying “defined tasks” depends on curriculum leaders having these in place.
Therefore, the final part of the whole school feedback approach was to create subject appendices that describe how each guideline would be met within a subject area. The "guidelines document has asterisks associated with key phrases which link to the sections of the subject appendix template (document shared below). The creation of individual subject appendices is comparable to the creation of curriculum plans, in that 70% of the value is in the creating, 30% is in the document created.
Curriculum leaders were given significant time to develop their subject appendix. Within this time they were supported to consider how feedback is most effective in their subject (using research and recommended reading), have meaningful discussions (with other middle leaders and their subject teams), and take into account teacher well-being.
To ensure a level of consistency all curriculum leaders met with senior leaders to discuss their proposal and finalise the details within. This allowed oversight into whether students would receive consistently high-quality feedback across all their lessons and that teachers in all subject areas had fair and comparable expectations placed on them.
Once the subject specific appendices had been finalised, curriculum leaders used faculty development time to ensure subject teachers had clear understanding of expectations of feedback both across the academy and in their subject. This gave curriculum leaders greater ownership of the implementation and sharing all subject appendices with all teachers promoted transparency between curriculum areas.
As we approach the end of our first year of implementation, we have reviewed and adapted the “core principles” and “guidelines” in response our own reflections on the effectiveness of the approach and what the most recent research and literature tells us about effective feedback. Curriculum leaders have subsequently adapted their appendices and we continue to improve and challenge historic practices that have, despite best intentions, served neither students nor teachers. Like with all areas of school improvement the work is never done and I am sure that the approach will need to evolve in the future to respond to our changing needs and priorities.
Below are the documents referenced above, I have included them for context, however I’d like to stress that the power of this approach is in the process, the product is not perfect or one-size fits all and is unlikely to be effective if transplanted into a new context. All schools are different and require a level of nuance to meet the needs of their students and teachers. Building the "core principles" and "guidelines" as a team was an essential part of the journey to ensure investment in the final product and a belief in reasoning behind the approach. Curriculum leaders are the foundation of any teaching and learning approach and their expertise in their subject areas is critical for its success. If you are reading this you are likely considering your whole school approach to feedback and perhaps the answers aren’t here, perhaps they are with your curriculum leaders and orchestrating their ideas to develop common themes in your context, would lead to the answer that is right for your school, your teachers and most importantly your students.
Cat Rushton
@CatherineRusht2
Feedback Core Principles*:
Feedback Guidelines*:
Subject Appendix Template*:
*All resources have had school logos removed.