Editorial
The landscape of education and…
by Natasha Tay, Management and Leadership in Schools Programme, July 2023
Very often, feedback is transmission-focused from teacher to student, where useful and correct information is shared to help improve performance. Feedback practices exist in various forms, for example, using the Praise, Question and Polish frame, verbal check-ins during class and overall feedback comments on students’ work. Teachers mostly use feedback for correcting students’ mistakes, giving suggestions for improvement and praising their efforts. Students are often found not actively participating in seeking and clarifying the feedback given, neither do teachers monitor closely how students have utilised the feedback.
If we truly believe that assessment can give hope to our learners, I invite you to join me and rethink together as a fraternity how feedback can be transformative instead of informative.
Understanding the feedback process as learner-focused, I suggest 3 ways for information to be meaningfully used for sense-making, to close learning gaps, motivate self-regulation and create reflective dialogues.
1. Teacher and Student Feedback Literacy
My school embarked on a whole-of-school journey of Michael Fullan’s Deep Learning (DL)[1] a year ago. In the Aesthetics (Art, Music, Food and Consumer Education) subjects in my department, Creativity and Communication are the 2 key competencies for assessment in these dimensions: Creativity – pursue and express novel ideas and solutions and Communication – design for audience and impact. These competencies are honed through our subject-based contexts and skills.
Responding to the recent MOE Workplan Seminar [2] in developing our students to become Creators, Connectors and Contributors, building our teachers’ capacity for assessment literacy is imperative to develop students’ critical, adaptive and inventive thinking and communication skills through the Aesthetics subjects.
Assessment for Learning (AfL)
AfL should therefore be guided by the trifecta of practices (Tan, 2013) and foregrounded by starting and extending from Box 4 of Tan (2022)’s 4 boxes on how assessment knowledge and coherence can translate to learning outcomes. (Fig. 1).
Necessitating a paradigm shift on what students learn in terms of acting on feedback, we will enable transfer and sustainability by front-ending assessment in the planning and designing of learning activities. This helps our discipline-specific feedback practices focus on helping students to learn. One way is to re-culture the department into a community of practice to set common assessment standards relating to curriculum content, performance achievements, assessment and feedback, and redesigning tasks to gradually move away from ‘end-loaded’ (i.e., at the end of the course) (Hounsell, 2007) project tasks into patchwork or nested tasks. This allows feedback from multiple sources on interrelated tasks to support the students’ purposeful learning and achievement.
Tan (2014) recommends 3 feedback practices 1. Feedback as dialogue with students, and not unilaterally imposing feedback on students, 2. Provide an applied context for feedback to be used and 3. Being clear about what students can, and must, do with feedback for their learning. The 7 principles of feedback [Nicol and MacFarlane (2006)] help us to develop quality feedback, and feedback should occur as an iterative dialogue with students’ feedback recipience.
To instil confidence in assessing DL through AfL for maximum students benefits, teachers need to concern themselves with feedback engagement for uptake: affective, behavioural, and cognitive (Price et al. 2011) and expand their ‘conceptualisation of feedback beyond just external feedback dialogue with teachers and/or peers, to include internal feedback dialogue that is prompted by students’ sense-making of external feedback and their self-reflection (Goh, 2021). For feedback to be successful, we also consider the conditions for Capacity, Designs and Culture (Henderson et al. (2019) (Fig. 2).
As middle leaders, we grow our teachers’ feedback literacy by intentionally building readiness, customising the plan for them by empathising with their individual needs, rightsizing and pacing their growth.
On the other hand, student feedback literacy denotes the understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of comments and use them for enhancement purposes (Carless & Boud 2018) and is necessary for agentic feedback engagement where students share responsibility as learners and contribute constructively to make feedback processes effective.
2. A Social-constructivist View
Students will flourish in self-regulated learning (SRL) by being engaged in interactions with teachers by making sense of the feedback given, negotiating meanings, and expressing their perspectives. With a good grasp of assessment standards and task strategies to enhance the quality of their work and processes in the domains of creativity, communication, and subject-based skills according to the learning progressions (Fig. 3), students begin to own their improvement plans by participating in feedback exchanges.
Support for students will require unpacking the rubrics of the student’s version of the learning progressions together and modelling the way for students to adopt the pro-active attitude of seeking specific areas of feedback and setting goals for themselves ahead. Creating opportunities for a safe space to invite the student’s voice will encourage their Receptivity to Instructional Feedback (RIF).
3. Interactive Feedback Dialogue
One feedback practice of the Interactive Feedback Dialogue Sheet (Fig. 4) which could be in physical or e-form would be a way to begin inculcating the habit of dialoguing through feedback in a constructive and guided way. This activates the student’s voice in requesting for feedback and knowing what they understand from the feedback to close their learning gap. Not only would it be a platform for dialogue with the open-ended questions, it also promotes extended and continuous conversations.
For effective implementation of the Interactive Feedback Dialogue Sheet, these are prior conditions:
- Students’ understanding of Success Criteria (with exemplars if possible)
- Students’ Self-Assessment
- Interactive Feedback Dialogue Sheet (adapted to consider cognitive maturity, linguistic ability, and motivation of students)
- Students’ Self-Checklist
Assessment Leadership for Change
As we take the driver’s seat to lead assessment change, we anticipate epistemic, procedural, and pragmatic resistances (Deneen & Boud, 2014) (Table. 1)
and these can be tackled by synthesising the 5 Principles of Practice in leadership for learning (Swaffield & MacBeath, 2009) with Tactical, Technical and Ethical Leadership (Tay et al., 2020) (Table 2),
as well as understand the conditions – department profile and how ambitious is the change amidst the current situation and over a period of time, i.e., consider the people and practice to formulate the leadership strategies. A realistic time frame should be at least 3 years to see the results of implementation.
Framework and Roadmap
The overview assessment change is illustrated with a framework using a hybrid of Assessment Reform Group (2008) + Logic Model (1998) (Figure. 5).
This roadmap (Figure. 6) shows the direction, alignment and commitment that the department would take on in this assessment change. Each phase spans 3-6 months.
Conclusion
My reflections from learning about Assessment and Leadership through the MLS experience are encapsulated in this image that I have drawn (Figure. 7):
The relationship between these 3 concepts of efficacy, literacy and leadership can be complex yet meaningful. Effective leadership may involve assessing the efficacy of the assessment strategies and interventions to make informed decisions and drive positive outcomes. Literacy, on the other hand, is a foundational skill that can empower me in my assessment leadership and have clarity in what exactly we want out of assessment.
The analogy of the multiple roles we play as teachers, colleagues, leaders, and learners is like holding up a mirror to continually reflect and bravely see through the lenses of each role we assume. Sustainable change begins with meaningful conversations with colleagues to allow new readings of issues that we encounter, and reflections to become better versions of ourselves.
[1] New Pedagogies for Deep Learning. (2023, June 21). Homepage – New Pedagogies for Deep Learning. https://deep-learning.global/
[2] Speech by Minister Chan Chun Sing at WPS 2023. (n.d.). MOE. https://www.moe.gov.sg/news/speeches/20230920-speech-by-minister-chan-chun-sing-minister-for-education-at-the-wps-2023-at-expo-convention-hall
References
Deneen, C., & Boud, D. (2014). Patterns of resistance in managing assessment change. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 39(5), 577-591.
Goh, R. (Ed.) (2021). Designing quality assessment feedback practices in schools. Pearson Education.
Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The Power of Feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81–112. https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487
Henderson, M., Philips, M., & Ryan. T. (2019). Conditions that enable effective feedback. Higher Education Research & Development, 38(7), 1401 – 1416.
Hounsell, D. (2007). Towards a More Sustainable Feedback to Students. In D. Boud & N. Falchiko (Eds.) Rethinking Assessment for Higher Education: Learning for the Longer Term (pp. 101-113). London: Routledge.
John Gardner J., Harlen W., Hayward L., Stobart, G. (Assessment Reform Group, 2008). Changing Assessment Practice Process, Principles and Standards.
MacBeath, J., Swaffield, S., & Frost, D. (2009). Principled Narrative. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 12(3), 223-237.
Michael Fullan, Joanne Quinn, Joanne McEachen (2017). Deep Learning Engage the World, Change the World. https://michaelfullan.ca/books/deep-learning-engage-the-world-change-the-world/
Price, M., Handley, K., & Millar, J. (2011). Feedback: Focusing attention on engagement. Studies in Higher Education, 36(8), 879-896. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2010.483513
Tan, K. H. K. (2013). A Framework for Assessment for Learning: Implications for Feedback Practices within and beyond the Gap. ISRN Education: 1 – 6.
Tan, K. H. K. (2014). Assessment Feedback Practices for Enhancing Learning. In W. S. Leong, Y. S. Cheng, & K. H. K. Tan (Eds.), Assessment and Learning in Schools (pp.129-139). Pearson Education.
Tan, K. H. K. (2022). The Four Boxes of Assessment Literacy Feedback. Assessment For All Learners. https://assessmentforall.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-four-boxes-of-assessment-feedback.html
Tay, H. Y., Tan, K. H. K., Deneen, C. C., Leong, W. S., Fulmer, G. W., & Brown, G. T. (2020). Middle Leaders’ Perceptions and Actions on Assessment: the Technical, Tactical and Ethical. School Leadership & Management, 40(1), 45-63.
The W. K. Kellogg Foundation (1998), Introduction to Logic Models.
Winstone, N., Nash, R., Parker, M., & Rowntree, J. (2017). Supporting Learners’ Agentic Engagement with Feedback: A systematic review and a taxonomy of recipience processes. Educational Psychologist, 52, 17-37. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2016.1207538