Staff article of special interest
Feedback happens every day, in every lesson, in every school. It is part of our everyday teaching but there is no set way in which everyone should do it. Practice varies depending on students, staff, stage of year, and many other factors. To analyse and evaluate current feedback systems, a focus group was created involving a small group of infant, junior and senior teachers. The aim of this group was to firstly evaluate best practice within BSB and to assess the feedback systems employed by other Inspired schools across the Middle East region. In Infants, Mrs Devika Nanda assessed a wide range of feedback types ranging from self marking to verbal feedback. This focused on both virtual and classroom based learning as teachers have had to dramatically adapt their traditional practices in recent times. In juniors, both Miss Samantha Moore and Miss Laura Rogers completed similar research and added to this by looking closely at how students responded to feedback given by the teacher. In addition to this, Sam contacted Knowledge Gate International School in Muscat with Laura contacting Reddam House in the UK, to see similarities and differences between practices used by each school. In the senior school, Ms Naomi Gay and Mrs Nicola McHugh took a more statistical approach and gathered data about what staff currently do and what their opinions are with regards to the effectiveness of different strategies used, the frequency in which feedback is given, how often students respond to feedback and how peer/self-assessment happens in lessons. In infants the main findings were that teachers have adapted their practice well to meet the needs of both the in school and online learners. For the younger children, verbal ‘over the shoulder’ feedback seems to be most effective. As the Infants children have dedicated on campus/virtual teachers, teaching and learning is happening in small groups and children are getting constant formative feedback as they work. The slightly older children, in Year 2, are practising their self marking and editing skills, and are beginning to provide peer feedback; this is giving them ownership of their own learning.
