Dylan Wiliam states that feedback should cause thinking and result in ‘more work for the recipient than the donor’. This means that we should not provide students with detailed feedback unless we plan in time for students to use the feedback to improve their work. Initially it is best if time to respond to feedback is built into lesson time, however once an ethos has been created and routines established this can be built into homework tasks.

The basic principle is that pupils must engage with their feedback. Have high expectations. Expect students to spend ten times as much time as you in this process! If they spend less time reflecting on their feedback and responding to it than you did marking it, something is going wrong. You can arrange your seating plan to seat pupils with the same targets together.  They can support each other and you can help them together. 

Students’ books should show evidence of re-drafting and attempts to address the issues raised in their feedback. The best marking is marking that has been acted upon and where marking creates a dialogue between the pupil and the teacher about the learning process. It is far better to open a student’s book and see a few small steps of clear progress built on simple marking rather than screeds of comments that students don’t appear to have read. In the example below the student has recorded verbal feedback from the teacher on what he needs to do to move from a ‘B’ to an ‘A’ grade. They have then used the feedback to redraft a paragraph.

Strategies

• ‘Responded to feedback’ stickers – pupils are provided with an opportunity to respond to feedback in the lesson. They place a ‘Responded to written feedback’ sticker next to the place in their book where they have responded to written teacher feedback. At GCSE we encourage students to write a brief note to explain how they used the feedback.

 
• If the student has also incorporated feedback from a peer or oral feedback from the teacher at an earlier stage in the process they use an appropriate sticker and annotate their work in the same way. The use of the stickers and the clear expectation that they will demonstrate how they have used the feedback helps students when it comes to reflecting on their learning and makes it more likely that they transfer techniques

 
• Responding to feedback trackers – Roy Watson-Davis developed the trackers below to monitor how pupils were responding to feedback and to encourage good study habits. These were piloted successfully at Key Stage 3.

 
• We have developed the tracker below for use with GCSE and A level students.

 
•  At ‘A’ level we also track the amount of time that students spend responding to feedback using the following reflection sheets (filled in once a week during the first term of AS or until good study habits have been established).