Providing Feedback

Even in the early years foundation stage, children seek to compare their performance with their peers. In this section, you will learn practical and immediately actionable advice on ways that you can provide feedback to your children that will drive their learning in ICT capability forward. It’s time to harness its power and improve learning.

Teacher Intervention

Feedback will mostly occur when you decide to intervene and as mentioned earlier, this can lead to the development higher order skills. However, your timing needs to be planned at particular points in the lesson when you stop the children to review what they have done and to explain the next stage. In your planning then, you need to consider the following key points as highlighted by Kennewell (2004, p. 146):

Planned points, in order to explain/demonstrate something which was not appropriate at the start, or to question children about what they are doing; Unplanned points, when a number of children have the same problem: try to predict these difficulties; How to drive the pace forward, perhaps setting more specific targets.

How to Focus on the reaction of Children, Not the Feedback?

It was once said that feedback that the child does not act on is a waste of time (William & Leahy, Strategy 2: Engineering effective discussion, tasks and activities, 2015). This is something which I totally agree on. The only thing that matters is the reaction of the children to the feedback you provide them. As an

educator, the most effective feedback that you can provide children is the one that will improve their learning. The following are some techniques for you to use.

One of the most important things that any educator can do is to get to know your children. When it comes to providing feedback, this is so important because as every child is different, so should their feedback be. What one feedback will do to a child positively, may have negative effects on the other.

Personalised learning is about connecting with a child’s experience of the world. Learn about the aspects of their life that make them who they are such as their faith, social customs of their family etc.

You also need to build the trust between you and the children as research has shown that those children receiving wise feedback are more likely to improve the quality of their work.

Be cautious about what you hear in relation to feedback. Perhaps the best advice would be make your feedback descriptive rather than evaluative. Yet there are times when evaluative feedback would be best. For example, if the child can use evaluative feedback to improve or focus their learning (William & Leahy, Strategy 2: Engineering effective discussion, tasks and activities, 2015).

To enhance child work, you can build children’s capacity to use feedback. According to William & Leahy (2015), there are three triggers that can affect how children react to feedback. These are:

• Truth triggers; • Relationship triggers and; • Identity triggers.

In truth triggers, it is the child’s perception of the truth that matters and the actual truth of the matter is irrelevant. They are related to the child’s perception of the accuracy of the feedback.

Relationship triggers refers to the type of relationship that you have with the child. For example, if you don’t the child well or are new to the setting or you are not punctual and criticize a tardy child, it may be seen as hypocritical. It is the “Look who’s talking” mentality. These triggers include feedback that the

child may reject because the donor is regarded as overly critical. There is a chance when using this trigger that a child may ignore the feedback because of the way the child interprets the feedback. It could be seen as a statement about the relationship between the donor and the child (William & Leahy, Strategy 2: Engineering effective discussion, tasks and activities, 2015).

The last trigger, identity, is to do with the child’s view of themselves. William and Leahy (2015) state that when feedback challenges a child’s image of themselves there will most likely be a negative response to feedback such as there being a reduced aspiration in addition to the feedback being ignored.

Understand that individuals vary greatly in how they react to feedback. Some might be so focused on improvement that they don’t need any sweet talk, and just want to get on to improving things. Others may need a bit of positive feedback before they can accept even the slightest criticism.

You can also model responding to feedback by giving them practice in less emotionally charged context. Here is how you do it:

Write feedback on a piece of work by an anonymous child in another class; Make one copy per group of children and give each a copy of the work, together with the success criteria for the task; Ask each group of children to improve the work by following your feedback; Each group can then explain to the class the improvements they have made to the work or they could display their improvements.

How to develop a Growth Mindset in children

Help your children see a connection between the feedback and the improvement To achieve this, you need to document and draw attention to the improvements that children make through effort. This is easily done in a practical subject like ICT. Focus on self-efficacy, not self-esteem It is more important to make children feel good about themselves because of their confidence in their ability to achieve goals than to do it on something like