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  • Support for early career teachers
  • Education Development Trust
  • Year 2: First half-term: deepening assessment, feedback and questioning

    • Evidence

    Over time, feedback should support pupils to monitor and regulate their own learning

    You will not be available or able to provide support all of the time to help pupils improve their work. This might be because you are working with a small group during an activity or it is an independent learning task, such as homework or self-study. In the longer term, you won’t be their teacher forever! You want to avoid a situation whereby all learning is dependent on you, the teacher, being available to offer support and guidance. To achieve this, you will need to think about how to support your pupils to self-regulate and to monitor their own learning.

    This will not be automatic. In fact, pupils will need regular feedback on their attempts to monitor and regulate (i.e. take control of) their own learning. Over time, they will be able to do it without your support and this will both reduce your workload and mean that your pupils can make better progress in their learning.

    You learned about metacognition and some strategies for teaching it as part of Block 3. You will remember that the EEF Guidance Report on Meta-Cognition & Self Regulated Learning (2017) tells us ‘self-regulated learners are aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and can motivate themselves to engage in, and improve, their learning’.

    There are three aspects to self-regulation; cognition, meta-cognition and motivation (EEF, 2017). All three are important, inter-dependent aspects of the learning process and you will need to consider each one carefully when thinking about how to help pupils monitor and regulate their own learning.

    Key terms

    Cognition

    The mental processes involved in knowing, understanding and learning. Cognitive strategies include memorisation techniques or subject-specific strategies like how to solve an equation.

    Metacognition

    The ways learners monitor and purposefully direct their learning. Meta-cognitive strategies include planning what technique to use, monitoring if it is working and choosing to adapt if it is not.

    Motivation

    Our willingness to engage in meta-cognitive or cognitive strategies. For example, convincing ourselves to revise for a test we have tomorrow.

    When giving feedback to pupils, you should make specific reference to the cognitive strategies which they used or could have used. Be aware that because we cannot see cognitive strategies, we are commenting on surface-level evidence. Therefore, feedback might include:

    • Restructuring understanding
    • Confirming to students that they are correct or incorrect
    • Indicating that more information is available or needed
    • Pointing to directions students could pursue, and/or
    • Indicating alternative strategies to understand particular information.

    (Hattie & Timperley, 2007)

    Giving feedback on cognitive processes will help expand pupil awareness of which cognitive strategies worked and what they could try next time.

    Video

    Commenting on cognitive strategies

    Watch the video below and answer the following questions:

    • how does the teacher identify which cognitive strategies the pupil has used?
    • how does the teacher give feedback on the effectiveness of these strategies?
    • how does the feedback help the pupil to try new cognitive strategies in the future?
    Video script

    Teacher: “Yasin, can you tell me how you solved the problem?”

    Yasin: “First, I read all of the information and I noticed that the alarm is going off every 12 minutes and the light flashing every 8 minutes so to find out when they must both go at the same time I know I can multiply 12 and 8 to find a common multiple.”

    Teacher: “So, you identified the key information from the problem, 12 minutes and 8 minutes, and you recognised that you would need to find a common multiple of 12 and 8. You used a good strategy to multiply 12x8 to calculate a time when both 12 and 8 would be going off. This has worked, but I wonder whether you considered if this would be the first time that the alarm and light would go off at the same time? Is there another possible answer which comes before 96?”

    Yasin: “Hmm. I guess so. I didn’t really think about it.”

    Teacher: “You have already identified that there needs to be a common multiple for 12 and 8 so why don’t you start listing all of your multiples of 12 and 8 to try and spot a lower common multiple”.

    In Block 3, you learnt about the importance of explicit instruction on metacognitive strategies for pupils so they could more effectively plan, monitor and evaluate their own learning. Knowing how they learn and awareness of their learning through meta-cognition is the first step to being a self-regulated learner. After you have explicitly taught pupils the metacognitive strategies which they should use for a task, you can give specific feedback in relation to them.

    For example:

    • “You have clearly planned this essay, demonstrated through your coherent structure and the sequencing of key points. You need to monitor your time more effectively as you can see that the earlier paragraphs are longer and more detailed, but towards the end of the essay your points become less convincing as they are less developed with quotes and evidence.”
    • “From your working out, I can see that you evaluated that you had made a mis-calculation by checking whether your answer worked. This is an excellent strategy and allowed you to go back and make the correction.”
    • “Next time, you should plan how you will explain the characteristics by listing them out first. This means you will be less likely to forget one!”

    Over time, as pupils have opportunities to respond to your feedback on their metacognitive strategies, they will develop the skills for themselves. As they get older, they will naturally begin to do this more, but with effective feedback this will happen sooner.

    As Wiliam & Christadoulou (2017) tell us, ‘students will only act on feedback if they believe they can get better and so motivating students to believe in improvement itself becomes a key part of the challenge’. Not all types of feedback are equally effective in promoting learning (Hattie & Timperley, 2007) so it makes sense to start with those for which we have good evidence of effectiveness. Related to each, there are specific things you can do to support pupils in monitoring their own responses:
    How to support pupils to self-regulate What does this look like in practice
    Provide individual feedback - Personalise feedback. - Provide feedback to each pupil.
    Focus on improvement - Tell pupils what they need to do to improve. - Provide specific steps. - Outline the process pupils need to take to improve their response.
    Focus on the work rather than the pupil - Keep feedback positive. - Ensure feedback is non-judgemental. - Comment on the work produced. - Keep comments constructive and supportive.
    Provide feedback on ways to learn - Share the most effective ways to learn with pupils. - Show your pupils what good looks like. - Show pupils the value of putting effort in to improving and editing their work.
    Help pupils set realistic, achievable goals - Model goal-setting. - Encourage your pupils to reflect on where they are and where they want to be. - Show pupils how to set targets for themselves. - Help pupils track their progress.

    In your notepad

    Thinking about the table above, how do you support pupils to monitor their own learning?

    What further steps will you take?

    References

    Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007) The Power of Feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81–112. https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487

    Gibson, S., Oliver, L. and Dennison, M. (2015) Workload Challenge: Analysis of teacher consultation responses. Department for Education. Accessible from: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment*data/file/485075/DFE-RR456A*-_Workload_Challenge_Analysis_of_teacher_consultation_responses_sixth_form_colleges.pdf.

    Muijs, D., & Reynolds, D. (2017) Effective teaching: Evidence and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

    Wiliam, D. (2017) Assessment, marking and feedback. In Hendrick, C. and McPherson, R. (Eds.) What Does This Look Like in the Classroom? Bridging the gap between research and practice. Woodbridge: John Catt.