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.

Staff article of special interest

In juniors the main findings were that marking and feedback is consistent with all teachers using pink and green highlighters to show children's successes and their next steps. Children are aware of the different colour highlighters and are then able to go back over their work and use ‘Fix it’ time to correct any mistakes.

In seniors, the findings showed that the majority of formative feedback is being given either verbally, or via comments (i.e. google docs and slides), and peer and selfassessment are usually used regularly. Document studio and some other methods (such as google classroom rubrics) are used by some departments as a quick means of providing multiple students with feedback. Most teachers give students time to act on this feedback within one lesson or more. General positive feedback is often reported using the well done postcard and HoY commendations via iSAMs as these are automatically sent to students and parents.

With this interesting research completed, the group brought their thoughts together and are now focusing on experimenting with a wide variety of different feedback methods, to see what effect these may have on certain classes and year groups. Other teachers across the whole school have also been asked to experiment and contribute to the groups findings. If you would like to be part of this research there's still time, please contact one of the teachers mentioned in this article to join in. The group hopes to collaborate on a short document highlighting this research and develop strategies and suggestions that can be used by staff for guidance and inspiration in the future, ready for September 2021.

Mr J Macmillan