I believe everyone wants to be successful, no matter the task; I don’t know anyone who wants to fail. What we really want is to know how to be successful; we want effective feedback.

I’m experiencing this school year both as a teacher and as a student. It enables me to reflect on teaching and learning from both perspectives. Recently, I’ve been reflecting on feedback.

One of the most effective strategies to improve student achievement, according to John Hattie’s Visible Learning for Teachers  research study, is feedback. When my students complete an assignment or finish a test, they anxiously wait for their grade, but feedback at the end is sometimes too late.

As a student in a principal licensure program, I agonized over my first assignment. There was no exemplar, and I wasn’t really sure what the expectations were even though I had clear instructions. I wondered how my work would compare with that of others in my cohort, and I wondered if I was on the right track. Moments after I submitted my work, I began anxiously waiting for some kind of feedback. When it came, I looked straight to the comments…not to the grade.

As a student, what I crave is feedback along the way that helps me succeed.

Grant Wiggins seemed to read my mind in his ASCD article entitled, Seven Keys to Effective Feedback. His description of the essentials of good feedback captures just what I want as a student:

I want my feedback to be timely, ongoing, and consistent.
I want my feedback to be goal-referenced, actionable, and tangible.
I want my feedback to be specific and personalized, just for me.

As a teacher, this year I will focus on:

• more frequent goal-setting
• more formative assessment
• more frequent personal conferencing
• more timely feedback during the learning process
• more progress monitoring and charting or graphing of results
• more visual representations, such as timelines or ladders of skills
• more opportunities to compare work in progress with exemplars

As a teacher, I owe it to my students to empower them with effective feedback…and I’ll even ask them to empower me with feedback, too!