Giving feedback should not only be understandable by our students, but should also be understood

 by you, the educator! During almost every conversation I have with colleagues, the topic of student feedback arises. The hardest part about giving strong feedback to students is the list of factors that influence the delivery of the feedback. 

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     Grant Wiggins' (2012) Seven Keys to Effective Feedback is an article for educators to consider to ensure that they are truly giving feedback that will help students develop attainable learning goals :

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1. Goal-Referenced : For all learners, it is crucial to bring clarity to specific goals for any task or lesson, and create success criteria with them so they remain on the same page (p. 13)

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2. Tangible & Transparent: Keeping the feedback as understandable as possible by all of our learners is key. Additionally, we want the end results to be just as understood and visible as the individual goals we create with, and for, students (p. 13).

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3. Actionable: Educators should always keep feedback specific and useful so that it can be applicable in many learning situations. We want our feedback to be accepted by our learners. Most importantly, we want to highlight what went well and what didn't work so well (p.14).

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4. User-Friendly:  Feedback is based on one or two key elements so that students aren't overwhelmed. We want to share one important thing with the student to ensure that they understand the importance of what we noticed first (p. 14).

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5. Timely: One of the biggest problems in education today is untimely feedback. Educators need to work a little extra hard to discover ways to give our students feedback in a timely manner and offer them opportunities to use the given feedback as soon as possible (p.14).

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6. Ongoing: Ongoing feedback gives us, and of course our learners, the ability to re-develop original learning goals and outcomes. If they are unsuccessful during the original feedback, educators should create a "feedback loop" that wrangles in all of the adjustments previously made to make better, stronger feedback for students (p.15).

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7. Consistent: Educators should be looking at student work alongside students to ensure the quality of their work. Using co-created rubrics gives us opportunities to observe our feedback in action. In this case, feedback is much more reliable and realistic for all our learners (p. 15)!