By Christopher Tan

Preamble

If you are reading this, and you are not a tutor at NIE, then welcome to MLS  3404. I presume you are here either because you have some nascent interest in leading assessment feedback practices in schools or because you did not get some other elective in time during the bidding process. Rest assured, dear reader, that whether you are a participant in virtue of choice or circumstance, there is plenty to learn at MLS 3404.

My letter to you is broadly divided into three sections: first, a preamble with some caveats to manage your expectations, then my recommendations for how you might adopt some of the more helpful ideas discussed in MLS 3404, and a concluding personal reflection.

I should begin with an apology: if you are a non-IP head, such as the many Year Heads or School Staff Developers who attend MLS, this letter is not really directed at you. While you can certainly influence assessment feedback practices in your school by role modelling in your own subject classrooms, my project here is to address what an IP head can do – in their capacity as a curriculum leader – to enact change. As an English Language HOD myself, my reflections naturally shine through this lens, and I am making the assumption that you will have similar capacity.

Secondly, I should confess that what I found most helpful from MLS 3404 was the readings curated by Dr. Jessica To. In particular, the supplementary reading, Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning, a guidance report by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), was quite compelling and I have adopted their framework in thinking about implementation and tying the many key ideas about effective feedback from the MLS 3404 sessions together.

Principles and Applications

In his guest foreword to the above-mentioned guidance report, Professor Dylan Wiliam writes emphatically that “feedback is likely to be more effective if it is approached systemically, and specifically, by adopting three fundamental principles: careful groundwork before the feedback is given, providing well-timed information that focuses on improvement, and also taking into account how learners receive and use that information”^[1].

Dr To teaches essentially the same concepts in her course and I think the guidance report is therefore a kind of useful summary to navigate these ideas. The first principle relates to what Dr To describes as “pre-task engagement”. In the context of my own school, I think too often teachers have dived into frequent continual classroom assessment without involving the students sufficiently in the co-construction of the success criteria and helping them develop a nose for quality or a good sense for where they should be headed in their learning.

One concrete way we can involve students in laying this groundwork is to make better use of samples of strong and weak work – a key AFL strategy often highlighted by heads of language departments while I was on MLS. While my department does make use of this strategy for post-assessment, I intend to make use of this more for pre-task engagement as well.

In a similar vein, laying the groundwork for effective feedback also means ensuring high-quality instruction and the pervasive use of formative assessment strategies leading up to any important assessment task. As an English Language teacher, I frequently assign and give feedback on students’ compositions. One of the useful strategies Dr To introduced to us for MLS 3404 is the idea of a “patchwork approach” to assessment, which creates the opportunity for students to do a first draft of their work, benefit from self and peer assessment, and the teacher’s evaluation of said assessments, before the final task proper.

The second principle is that feedback should be delivered at an appropriate time and with an emphasis on moving learning forward. If the previous principle of laying the groundwork is about “feeding up” then this principle is more about “feeding forward” (a distinction that Dr To uses frequently in her sessions, in addition to the concept of “feeding back”).

This idea, that students must be provided with a timely opportunity to act on feedback and “close the loop” with a relevant follow-up task is probably the biggest challenge to my department’s current assessment practice. The English Language syllabus has six areas of language learning, divided between the receptive and productive, which often translates to schemes of work (SOWs) that feature many different assessment tasks back-to-back, from reading or listening comprehension to oracy-related tasks and, of course, plenty of writing. The upshot of all this is that if a student writes a composition – and receives feedback on their writing – in Term 1, they may very well not encounter a similar writing task until the next term!

How then should sufficient time and space for an interactive feedback loop be carved out of SOWs that at present emphasise curriculum coverage and completion? Structurally, the removal of Mid-Year Examinations at all levels has certainly helped to free up some curriculum time. In my school at least, I think the answer lies in spiral progression. I have observed that concepts taught in Secondary 3 are frequently retaught – not merely re-visited – in Secondary 4. As teachers, if we want to lead assessment feedback practices, we cannot afford to rely on teaching and re-teaching for psychological comfort. If we can teach less, we can feedback more.

The third principle covered in the EEF’s report is that teachers must plan for how students will receive and use feedback. I think this principle will ring true with any teachers who have held a suspicion in their hearts that individual students may be spending mere seconds (if that) reading our feedback as against the hundreds of hours we pour into writing feedback. Feedback is only as useful as what students do

with it.

Obviously, the first two principles greatly contribute to manifesting the third. Additionally, I found the concept of Dedicated Improvement and Reflection Time (DIRT), which Professor Kelvin Tan introduced in his ultimate assessment lecture^[2], to be the most promising idea for implementing this in schools. Briefly, “the premise of DIRT is that students are most likely to learn from assessment if given the opportunity within class time to reflect upon and apply feedback”^[3]. It stems from observations of classroom practice in the UK.

Of course, this is already commonplace in our classrooms where teachers often spend the entire lesson upon returning an assessment task to do error analysis and guide corrections. What was new to me from Professor Tan’s lecture was the scope and variety of DIRT-related activities:

Figure 1: Screenshot of Professor Tan’s PowerPoint slide on DIRT

It dawned on me that I had not gotten my hands DIRT-y enough. Rather than directing the entire class to do corrections based on my written feedback, it will be a more efficient use of time to take a differentiated approach. For instance, one group of students might be better served spending the hour analysing exemplars against their returned work to self-assess areas for specific improvement. Another group might benefit from peer feedback, especially higher-progress students who have the shared goal of trying to achieve a distinction. While all these groups of students are meaningfully occupied, I can turn my attention to the lowest progress students who need their DIRT to be mediated by an expert – the teacher with new-found bandwidth in a class of forty-odd souls.

Concluding Thoughts

In Dr. To’s final session for MLS 3404, we were introduced to a reading on a Professional Learning (PL) intervention studied in Queensland, Australia’s state primary schools^[4]. It caught my eye that, in describing the success factors for the PL intervention, teachers identified time and space as critical factor. The PL intervention had protected time – during the school day, so no staying back was needed – on a fortnightly basis and was facilitated by external consultants over an extended period of six months.

When I turned to my MLS 3404 classmate, a primary school head of department, and asked her if she might find that kind of time back in school for implementation, her nonplussed reply was “I don’t even have time to use the toilet lah.” Indeed, the workload that results from written feedback is not something to be sniffed at. For the typical secondary school teacher with 120 students under their charge, a mere 5-minute assessment task translates to 10 hours of work – enough time to watch all three Lord of The Rings movies and more than the amount of time you will spend on MLS 3404.

If one is to speak seriously about leading assessment feedback practices in schools then, we must be equally serious about the opportunity cost that comes with laying any additional expectations upon teachers who may already feel overworked and under-appreciated.