Thoughts on Feedback

1. What do you privilege when you provide feedback?

Feedback is tricky. Often, students will ignore feedback, especially if they are only a grade; feedback is only useful if the students actually improve because of it. Therefore, it is essential to provide effective feedback, meaning feedback that is meaningful for students and practical. If feedback is only stating where students are and not helping them grow, then feedback is missing the point. It is therefore useful for teachers to provide feedback that connects with their students. This means going beyond just giving grades but actually helping students detect what they need to do to grow. Teachers therefore have to know their students and know what kind of feedback will be useful for them. On top of giving students feedback, feedback is also a beneficial process for teachers to know what the needs of their students are.

2. How does it connect to the content you are teaching?

In math, feedback can look like a few things. Feedback can look like positive remarks for what is being done well, or it could be questions to help students detect what went wrong (meaning helping students find what went wrong rather than just telling them what is wrong), or any kind of reminders to help fix misconceptions. If all that is given is a grade, students might just ignore it, but if they see positive remarks about their work, they might be motivated to keep up the good work. If students see questions about their work, this could instigate some detective work on their part, helping them grow in their learning. If students see reminders about misconceptions, they could then go back and fix their mistakes, strengthening their conceptions about the material. It all depends on the individual students.