Leadership Likes: Dr Purvis

This week Dr Purvis discusses feedback: Improving the pupil and not the work.

In one way or another, every week I meet pupils, teachers, and parents who are united in a desire for strong academic progress and ultimately, excellent outcomes. A crucial part of ensuring that progress and outcomes are maximised is the feedback that pupils receive on the work they complete in class, and at home. It is right to acknowledge that pupils spend a lot of time completing their work, and parents spend a similar amount of time ensuring that work is done! Recognising this, teachers devote significant amounts of their time to preparing feedback in the hope that it will mean that the next piece of work pupils produce demonstrates improvement (whatever that means for the subject and age range). It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that all parties are prone to frustration when progress or outcomes do not improve as expected.

One of the things we notice, repeatedly, is that pupils do not actively seek to close any gaps in their knowledge, skills or understanding as identified in the feedback they receive. Consequently, teachers end up providing the same feedback which means that progress—especially in outcome terms—can falter. One of the ways we have sought to overcome this is to provide pupils with one of the most precious commodities we have: time.

Our Austin’s Butterfly initiative—named after a famous educational study of one pupil’s progress in drawing a butterfly in light of the feedback they were given—seeks to provide pupils with the time and space in lessons or through PREP (our name for homework) to respond, directly, to teacher feedback by redrafting a section of their work. The main aim of what teachers are trying to do in this process—to paraphrase the thinking of Professor Dylan Wiliam—is not to improve a particular piece of work, though there will be times when this happens, and necessarily so. Instead, they are trying to improve the pupil themselves in a way which will lead to stronger outcomes for them in the future. It will also give them an ability to access these stronger outcomes with increasing independence and confidence across their learning.

Against this backdrop, this term we have begun scrutinising our marking and feedback policy to ensure its impact is maximised: importantly, marking and feedback are connected but not the same. Our adapted approach will be underpinned by three main principles:

 Feedback will be:

Meaningful: feedback should serve a single purpose, advancing progress and outcomes in subsequent work. Different forms of feedback will be appropriate in different situations, and the teacher should judge this.

 Manageable: feedback should be delivered in the ways which are most efficient for pupils and teachers. It is up to departments to devise an effective, achievable programme of marking, which balance the needs of pupils and teachers.

Motivating: feedback should help motivate pupils to progress in future work. This doesn’t mean only writing in-depth or positive comments. Pupils should be expected to check their work before they hand it in and should be taught the success criteria for a task (in an age-appropriate way).

As indicated above, you will notice over the coming term that we will actively diversify the feedback provided to pupils beyond written teacher comments to include the following range of approaches which will provide a strong ‘recipe for future action’ (to quote Prof. Wiliam, again).

Types of feedback will include:

• Instant feedback – at the point of teaching.
• Verbal feedback – in the lesson and face-to-face.
• Whole-class feedback – having read pupils’ work, the teacher will give verbal or written feedback on common mistakes, misconceptions, and areas for improvement as well as strengths. These notes should inform a taught Austin’s Butterfly activity.
• Austin’s Butterfly- based on whole-class and/or personalised feedback. This involves an activity that enables pupils to act on their feedback and achieve/know how to meet the targets set.
• Summative feedback – tasks planned to give teachers definitive feedback about whether a pupil has securely mastered taught material.

Underpinned by the principles and processes above, our teachers will still be providing the same excellent feedback which enables pupils to hone their knowledge, skills and understanding. However, it will be done with much more variety and with an emphasis on future action in the service of improving the pupil, rather than a particular piece of work. Why? Because we want to induct every one of our pupils into the guild of understanding in each subject that will serve them well during their time at school, and long after it.

Dr P Purvis
Deputy Head (Academic)