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  • Support for early career teachers
  • UCL
  • Year 1: First half-term: making productive use of assessment
    • Summer week 4

    Mentor materials

    Giving high-quality feedback

    Learning intentions

    Your ECT will learn that:

    • To be of value, teachers use information from assessments to inform the decisions they make; in turn, pupils must be able to act on feedback for it to have an effect.
    • High-quality feedback can be written or verbal; it is likely to be accurate and clear, encourage further effort, and provide specific guidance on how to improve.
    • Over time, feedback should support pupils to monitor and regulate their own learning.

    Your ECT will learn how to:

    Provide high-quality feedback, by:

    • Focusing on specific actions for pupils and providing time for pupils to respond to feedback.
    • Appreciating that pupils’ responses to feedback can vary depending on a range of social factors (e.g. the message the feedback contains or the age of the child).
    • Scaffolding self-assessment by sharing model work with pupils, highlighting key details.
    • Thinking carefully about how to ensure feedback is specific and helpful when using peer- or self-assessment.

    Topic introduction

    In their self-directed study session earlier this week, your mentee extended their knowledge of giving high-quality feedback.

    Your mentee will have considered their feedback practice by looking at previous feedback they have given. They may have spoken to pupils to find out their views on feedback they have received, how they interpreted it and what they did with it. They may also have spoken to a colleague to understand more about realistic expectations of students’ independence and self-regulation at different ages.

    This session can build on your mentee’s self-study activity and focus in more detail on its practical implications, such as how to scaffold effective self-assessment and peer-assessment. In this session, you will help your mentee understand the importance of skilled feedback and why developing skills of self-assessment and self-regulation are important to the learning process.

    Meeting activities

    Throughout the session, try to refer explicitly to the Learning Intentions, and encourage your mentee to record key points in their Learning Log. Tailor your use of the Theory to Practice activities below in response to the Review and Plan sections of this session.

    Review: 5 mins

    1. Start this session by briefly following up the actions that the mentee set at the end of last week’s session. Ask your mentee to summarise:
      • what they did
      • the impact of this on pupil learning (including how they are evaluating this)
      • what they will do going forward to build on these actions
    2. Clarify the Learning Intentions for this session with your mentee.

    Plan: 5 mins

    At the start of this module, you looked at all of the ‘learn how to’ statements for Standard 6 and conducted a module audit with your mentee. In some areas, they will already be confident and skilled; in others, they will want more practice and support from you and others. Look back at this audit now and use it to help decide how you and your mentee will make the most productive use of the suggested Theory to Practice activities below.

    Theory to Practice 35 mins

    Discuss with mentor

    Discuss with your mentee the relative merits of verbal and written feedback and how to maximise their impact on learning.

    You might consider factors such as:

    • how quickly pupils are able to receive and respond to feedback
    • the time taken for teachers to give different forms of feedback
    • whether or not an immediate response is needed
    • whether or not a record of feedback is needed (for example, if it is part of a formal assessment process)
    • the quantity of feedback that pupils are able to remember and respond to at once
    • how pupils with different characteristics (e.g. age or social factors) may respond differently to each form of feedback
    • how pupils with different characteristics may need different degrees of detail in feedback and time to respond
    • examples of times when giving verbal feedback during lessons may be preferable to giving written feedback after lessons
    • strategies for giving verbal feedback during lessons – including to individuals, groups of pupils and whole class feedback

    Collaborative planning

    Using the characteristics of good self- and peer-assessment outlined in the the research and practice summary in this week’s ECT materials, work with your mentee on one of the two options below to plan how they could build effective self-assessment into a forthcoming lesson that they will be teaching.

    If the group has not engaged in self-assessment with your mentee previously, focus planning on:

    1. the key details of self-assessment as a learning process that need to be highlighted to pupils, and
    2. creating an example of ‘model work’ which will help pupils to understand the success criteria for self-assessment as a learning process.

    If the group has experienced self-assessment activities previously with the mentee, focus planning on the lesson content which pupils will self-assess against. Help your mentee to:

    1. construct clear and detailed success criteria for the task, including a worked model, and
    2. plan for how they will support pupils to identify and act on clear, specific and helpful ‘targets-for-self’ as a result of their self-assessment.

    To support this activity, consider the following:

    • you will need to ensure that the worked model of high-quality self-assessment is itself of high quality, particularly if your mentee has little prior experience of supporting self-assessment
    • if you do not work in the same phase/specialism as your mentee, you may wish to seek input from a colleague with the appropriate expertise to quality assure the success criteria and worked model and to confirm that it suits the context of the class

    Scripting / rehearsal

    Ask your mentee to identify a part of the lesson that you have worked on together in activity (2) that they feel least confident about delivering. Support your mentee to script how they would deliver this part of the lesson, and then help them to rehearse the enactment of their script.

    To support this activity, you could:

    • give feedback to your mentee to highlight areas of strength in their practice and offer one or two strategies for further improving their delivery
    • connect your feedback to the research and practice summaries in the ECT materials provided within this module

    Next Steps: 5 mins

    Agree with your mentee how they will now put their learning from this week’s session(s) into practice in their teaching. Help your mentee to clarify:

    1. the action(s) they will take and how these action(s) are expected to contribute to improving pupil learning
    2. what success will ‘look like’ in relation to these action(s)
    3. how they will evaluate their success in taking these action(s)

    Note the date of your next mentor meeting, when you will check on your mentee’s progress.