Feedback: The mark of success – Part 4

According to research, feedback is one of the most impactful strategies at a teacher’s disposal. It can add eight months of pupil progress every year and result in at least half a GCSE grade’s improvement.

But, as with all teaching strategies, feedback is only impactful if it is done well. And yet our obsession with feedback as the cure for all of education’s ills, as a panacea for pupil progress, has led to some questionable practices.

Take, for example, some schools’ insistence that every teacher engages in dialogic marking whereby she holds detailed written conversations in pupils’ exercise books. Or some schools’ dogmatic determination that every teacher should assess every pupil at set times of the term and in ways dictated by a whole-school policy, irrespective of whether it is appropriate or helpful for that task, phase, subject, pupil, and teacher.