Editorial
The landscape of education and…
by Lim Mingxun and Darren Woo, Edgefield Secondary School
Introduction
The Social Studies curriculum is designed with the aim to develop students to become informed, concerned and participative individuals who are able to contribute responsibly to the society and world that they live in. Underpinning these characteristics is the development of a suite of skills and competencies that include critical thinking, reflective thinking and perspective taking. Appreciating the affordances of discussion-based pedagogies, teachers make use of these inquiry and authentic learning experiences to develop these competencies among their students.
At Edgefield Secondary School, the push for incorporating dialogue into feedback practices in Social Studies classrooms arises from several challenges in current assessment feedback practices. Firstly, students often seek explicit, step-by-step guidance from teachers on how to achieve higher marks, expecting a direct correlation between the feedback received and improved scores in future tasks. However, this approach is not always effective for Social Studies, where the ability to adapt and apply feedback to different questions is crucial. Teachers, therefore, aim to move beyond simply providing ‘correct answers’ and instead foster a deeper understanding of the rationale behind their feedback. The goal is to promote “proactive recipience”, where students “engage actively with feedback processes, thus emphasising the fundamental contribution and responsibility of the learner” (Winstone, Nash, Rowntree, & Parker, 2017). We share the belief that involving students in the feedback process enhances its efficacy. We do so through dialogue, where we work with students to clarify their thought processes. In doing so, we hope that students would eventually be able to independently evaluate and improve their work, and ultimately, critically discern information from various sources and apply it in various contexts, aligning with the broader educational objectives of Social Studies.
The Value of Feedback Dialogue
The Social Studies national examinations assess students’ ability to think critically about a given issue through the lens and perspectives offered by various sources. On top of critical thinking, students need to grapple with the language used in the sources, understand the message of the source, and select appropriate evidence before crafting an explanation in a response that answers the question. Evidently, there is much mental processing that students go through when attempting the examination questions.
At this point, it should be highlighted that the cognitive processes demonstrated in the examinations are no different from the ones outside the examinations. The globalised world that we live in today places us in a position of constant bombardment of various sources of information in various forms. Developing our students’ ability to make sense of the wide range and depth of information is a skill that is not only being assessed at the examinations but also one that develops them to be active, responsible and participative citizens.
But how do we develop ‘thinking’, and for that matter, ‘right thinking’? Herein lies the value of feedback dialogue.
Beyond its use in developing students’ critical thinking skills, Carless (2016) suggests that meaningful feedback should also be a dialogic process where learners interpret and engage with others’ comments, rather than a product. If feedback is merely given to students, its effectiveness is often limited (Sadler, 2010). Evidently, dialogue can play an important role in closing learning gaps. However, a commonly observed situation is that teachers usually give written feedback on students’ assignments and if students have questions, they come forward to ask teachers for clarification and/or answers. This may be perceived as dialogue, albeit an incidental one. As reflective practitioners, we realised that not all students were engaging in this spoken dialogue with their teachers. In so doing, teachers were not able to ascertain whether the students have read the given feedback, let alone cognitively processed that written feedback. If so, how can we say that the learning gap has been closed? The problem we realised then is the accessibility of dialogue.
We asked ourselves: If not spoken, how else can dialogue between teachers and students take place? We thus began exploring the idea of having written dialogues with our students, where just like any other regular conversation, we used a mix of open-ended questions and direct responses to their questions, perspectives and emotions. Through our use of dialogue as part of feedback pedagogy, we found out the following:
1. Feedback dialogue guides students to know what they do not know (think deeper)
Immediately upon completion of an assignment, students have the choice of reflecting on their just-completed work. While some choose to focus on the emotional aspect (eg. highlighting frustration towards themselves), some choose to focus on their time management skills. In Image 1.1, the student had chosen to highlight his uncertainty of the skill that is being tested (reliability) and consequently, was unable to fulfil the question’s demands for critical thinking. This is understandable considering that as budding learners, students (we) may not be fully aware of what they do not know. It is here that the teacher-student dialogue allows the student to clarify his own (non-/mis)understanding. As this ‘dialogue’ takes time through the feedback log (see below for more information), students have the chance to brood over their questions/ reflections.
2. Feedback dialogue builds students' confidence through affirmation
It goes without saying that a teacher’s words have the power to lift up a student’s confidence and morale. This ‘power’ is no longer limited to verbal words of encouragement but through written dialogue via the feedback log. Teachers are able to commend and affirm students’ hard work and positive reflections on their effort. It should also be added here that this format of “dialogue-ing” with students gives teachers the opportunity to affirm students’ positive reflections of themselves and effort, rather than solely based on their mark work. The affirmation given through dialogue, though written, has the power to ‘speak’ to the student directly rather than about the student’s work (Image 1.2).
3. Feedback dialogue clarifies students' own doubts/thinking
As part of the reflection phase of the feedback log (see below for more information), students are invited to share their thoughts and questions about a wide range of items. These items include the assignment itself as well as the soft skills such as time management. In Image 1.3, the student reflected on his time management during this practice. Through the dialogue, the student realises that something as straightforward as time management could actually be related to the thinking/reading skills required of him. It is also through dialogue that the teacher could shed light on the thinking processes that the student employs.
As seen from the aforementioned, while discussions, as a pedagogy, feature prominently in an issue-based curriculum (Social Studies Syllabus 2023), discussions in the form of dialogue can also be used powerfully as part of the feedback pedagogy that teachers employ. Applying Carless and Boud’s (2018) proposed framework on student feedback literacy, dialogue could also be a way to help students to improve their feedback literacy in terms of appreciating feedback, making judgements, managing affect, and taking action.
Feedback Pedagogy as a Suite of Tools to Ground, Enhance and Facilitate Dialogue
Effective feedback should incorporate feed-up, feedback, and feed forward processes (Hattie and Timperley, 2007). Moreover, each subject discipline has to design its own feedback model based on the needs of the discipline (Bennett, 2011, cited in Goh, 2021).
In this section, we endeavour to introduce you to three feedback tools that we have designed for our students in trying to promote greater student engagement and ownership with feedback.
Imagine yourself learning how to fly a kite: You approach this new skill with much fear and anxiety as you hear an experienced coach teach you the basics – what each part of the kite is called and does, where the string is connected to, etc. An experienced coach may even show you how the kite flies by holding it up and using his hands, demonstrating how the kite catches the wind and overcomes the drag forces. All this is done before the actual flying of the kite. Armed with this knowledge, you feel a little more encouraged and the coach nudges you to pick up the kite and launch it into the air. As the kite flies, your coach stands behind you, gently guiding you at each step of the way: when to release or hold onto the string’s tension, etc. As you hear all that your coach has to say while the kite is flying, you’re processing all that information and judging for yourself what your hands need to do. Perhaps at that point, you realise that while the coach is the one providing the feedback, you are the one holding the taut string, deciding whether the kite rises further or falls to the ground.
In the same way, our heartfelt aim as teachers is for our students to soar to their full potential while remaining grounded in their values and principles. In particular, as Social Studies teachers, we aim to develop our students to be active, concerned and participatory citizens who are capable of critical thinking while still remaining grounded in baseline standards. As shown in Illustration 1, we have developed three specific feedback tools, namely (1) Checklists and Exemplars on which the dialogue between Teacher and Student is based on, (2) Feedback Log which serves as the facilitatory platform for dialogue to take place, and (3) Thinking Wheel which serves as a tool for teachers to challenge students to go beyond the superficial content and consider other perspectives as part of critical thinking, all as part of feedback dialogue. (Note: You can click on the links in the headers below to find out more about the specific tool)
It should be noted from the onset that there is no prescribed sequence in which we use these tools. Teachers have the autonomy to select the tool that they feel best meets the needs of their students at that present moment. So while most Level Coordinators will usually plan for Checklists and Exemplars (feed-up) to be featured at the start of a skills-teaching unit, teachers of low-progress learners may want to revisit some elements of this tool during the course of teaching the skill. However, we generally followed the process below:
1. Checklists and Exemplars
We begin with our first tool — Checklists and Exemplars. We developed this tool because we recognised the importance of our students needing to know the elements of an answer that is considered successful (success criteria). Teachers could employ this tool in two ways:
- in a teacher-directed manner where the various success criteria are told to students before they look at corresponding exemplars, or
- in a student-led one where teachers show students a few exemplars and have them decide what makes one better than the others before deducing the success criteria for that skill.
Regardless of how checklists and exemplars are used, they remain useful in communicating baseline standards for students whenever they attempt the skill/ question. These standards become reference points, or handles, for students whenever they become confused or lost in the thinking about the information and sources.
Limitations of Checklists and Exemplars
That said, we realised from experience that when checklists and exemplars become the only point of reference for students’ learning and/or teachers’ feedback, these standards no longer become guideposts but limiting constraints. In other words, if all of the learning which students receive from the use of checklists is success criteria after success criteria, students may find themselves unnecessarily stressed and upset to ‘force’ the given source of information to fit the mould as provided in the relevant checklists and exemplars. In fact, in our experience, we find that students tend to be overly concerned about “checking off the boxes” in their checklists than actually thinking critically about the source. So, while checklists and exemplars do provide students a set of success criteria to know what makes a successful response as well as the current gaps, the tool in and of itself does not inform the students on how to close that gap. This is where we find value in dialogical pedagogy, as previously discussed, through the use of the Feedback Log.
2. Feedback Log
Upon recognizing the limitations of using checklists and exemplars, the teachers really wanted to ‘get into’ the minds of the students. We were not just interested in the students’ responses as informed by their use of checklists and exemplars, but we wanted to know what they were thinking of while doing the assignment. We recognized that metacognition in and of itself is difficult work, let alone practising metacognition while doing an assignment and then to demand this of a 15/16-year old! As such, we decided to scope this by getting students to set goals of their own before working on the assignment, and then finally reflecting on their self-perceptions of their task/ set goals.
Features of the feedback log
Setting goals
In setting goals, we noted that while some students chose to base their goals on the taught checklists, there were others who chose to set other goals such as time management (e.g. “I want to complete this assignment within 20mins”). When students reflect on their set goals while squaring them with their recent experience of completing the assignment, their written reflections offer the teacher an insight into what goes on in their minds. For some, it could be a lingering question about the skill, while for others, it could be a difficulty in understanding the source that they realised. There are also some who express worry in not being able to meet their said goals, while others express pride and satisfaction that they were able to do so. Regardless, it is these reflections that teachers respond to and then engage them in a written dialogue.
Giving targeted and meaningful feedback
Teachers continue to mark the students’ assignments and give the necessary feedback as per our usual practice. However, in the context of the feedback log, we also found that our teachers were able to intuitively align their given feedback with the students’ reflections. This coherence helps our students to better make sense of the feedback in relation to the questions/ thoughts/ feelings they may have towards their assignment. This improved sense-making, further enhanced through continued written dialogue, is observed through our students’ responses to the teacher’s first response in the written dialogue.
Setting new goals, or not…?
Not only do we get students to respond to their teachers’ responses and inputs, we also invite them to set new goals for themselves based on the feedback given. These new goals usually come in the form of the corrections that the students want to make, an improvement in their time management and/or depth of thinking employed in the next assignment. We would like to add that upon reflection, the teachers realised that getting students to write down a new goal at the end of every assignment may not be practical given that the sources for each case study in a Social Studies paper would vary and require different ways of (critical) thinking. Mandating that students write a goal regardless could backfire as the students may not be able to actively act on these goals, simply because the sources they are presented with do not allow them to do so. For example, after hearing from the teacher how the first assignment’s source allows for a deeper analysis of its purpose, a student (one who listens to every instruction from the teacher) may write in the post-assignment goal-setting that he/she will attempt an analysis of purpose for the next assignment. However, in fact, the source in that second assignment might not allow for such an analysis of purpose. Now, if teachers were to strictly enforce the need for students to set a goal for themselves, the student in this example may, instead of exploring the possibility of analysing other aspects of the source (e.g context), become needlessly constrained by the goal he had set earlier. Worse still, this internal struggle and negative emotions that accompany the constraint may eventually lead to nothing since the source does not allow for it. Alas, the student may thus feel a sense of failure and their autonomy curtailed.
All on one page
We think it noteworthy to add here that one comment we received from colleagues who have seen the feedback log is how everything — students’ goals, assignments, feedback dialogue — is conveniently located on one page. This was intentionally planned on our part simply because we wanted students to see the immediate connection between the feedback given and their assignment. What we did not expect was how this decision now afforded us the chance to get students to practice metacognition because all students need to look at are at most two to three pieces of information in their feedback log. Compared to the conventional style of giving feedback at the end of every student assignment (usually at the back of the foolscap paper) which is then stapled at the back of the question paper causing any feedback given to be relegated to the end, the feedback log brings all feedback given into sharper focus and as such, stronger emphasis simply because it is placed at the front, and side-by-side with the student’s work.
Limitations of feedback log
The feedback log in and of itself serves as a convenient and efficient way for students to not only compare the feedback next to their marked piece of work in that particular log, but also compare the collective feedback given across logs. The questions we asked ourselves as teachers then were namely:
- “What then should our students do with this feedback?”,
- “How do we develop our students’ self-directedness in pursuing the perspectives we suggest in the feedback given to them?”, and
- “Could we standardise across the teachers (with markedly different feedback styles) the feedback given to stretch our students’ critical thinking?”
These three questions prompted us to consider developing a third tool to both further our students’ critical thinking and concurrently develop their self-directedness, through engaging in a feedback dialogue with their teachers. This tool, the thinking wheel, could also provide handles to teachers when giving feedback to their students.
3. Thinking Wheel
In developing the thinking wheel, we had to distil the more common perspectives used when critically thinking about any given source of information, namely:
- Where did it come from? (Provenance)
- Who said it and when was it said? (Provenance)
- Is what is being said sensible/ informative/ expected? (Content)
- Is what is being said the complete set of details, or is there some obscuring of facts? (Content)
- Why was this source said/ produced? (Purpose)
- Do other sources corroborate with what was being said? (Cross referencing)
- Was there any significant event that occurred during the time that this source was said/ produced? (Context)
However, we intentionally did not want to develop these aforementioned perspectives to be yet another set of checklists for students to check against. Instead, we wanted these perspectives to be presented in the form of questions, so that students can ask themselves these questions and in so doing, develop these perspectives on their own.
The use of questions in the thinking wheel also enhances the tool’s versatility. Students can choose to refer to this thinking wheel while doing their assignment (I.e. students ask themselves these given questions that challenge their thinking while engaging with the source) or when considering the teacher’s feedback given after the assignment is completed (I.e. students ask themselves the questions corresponding to the perspective suggested in the teacher’s feedback). Over time, we hope that the continued use of the thinking wheel will help strengthen students’ ability to consider various perspectives whenever they consider any source of information.
The thinking wheel (Image 2) is made up of a core, followed by two concentric rings around it. The goal for students is to start from the core and move outwards towards the perspectives provided in the middle ring first, then to the outer ring.
Innermost core
The innermost core represents the core skill of understanding the language of the source. For any accurate thinking, let alone critical thinking, to take place, one must first start with an accurate understanding of the source. This can come in the form of understanding technical language (e.g. “blueprint”, “artificial intelligence”, etc.), issue-specific language (e.g. “active ageing”, “wages”, “assimilation”, “dove” to represent peace, etc.) or more broadly, a range of vocabulary (e.g. “incensed”, “unjustified”, etc.). Without an accurate understanding, and consequently an accurate interpretation of the words, phrases, sentences, and symbols provided in the given source, regardless of the question asked about it, students’ efforts to move to the middle ring will definitely be futile.
Middle ring
The middle ring broadly represents an analysis of the source’s content. We divided this ring into four quadrants, each targeting a set of thinking routines specific to the critical thinking skill tested. This delineation is necessary as it develops students’ critical thinking in that particular domain. For example, in considering whether a source is reliable or not, one will not consider whether the details provided in the source are useful — while the former focuses on the trustworthiness of the source, the latter focuses on whether the details provided are adequate in helping the student better understand the issue. As such, the questions for each of the four quadrants are unique to themselves.
Outer ring
Finally, the outer ring represents an analysis of the source other than its content. It is in this ring that we clarify the various perspectives that students can consider when critically analysing a source since each of these routes has its own distinct line of questioning. The four routes students can consider pursuing are namely: Cross-reference, consideration of Context, Purpose, and Provenance.
In challenging our students to ‘reach’ the outer ring, we do not limit their choice in the route they decide to take and definitely not directly instruct them to take a specific route all the time. And indeed, this is the case in any commonplace setting — as critical thinkers, we must nimbly consider the details presented before us and not adopt a fixed mindset in ‘force-fitting’ the given details and consequently, falsely dictating the outcome. In fact, here at Edgefield, teachers consider reaching the outer ring (regardless of route taken, and marks awarded) an achievement for our students.
Affordances
Definition of success at macro level
While checklists and exemplars help provide clarity of what success looks like to students when writing their response at the paragraph level, the thinking wheel does the same but at the whole-of-answer level. Students will know from the use of the thinking wheel that they cannot just consider what is being said (content) but should also consider the other perspectives of who (provenance), when (context), what (cross-reference) and why (purpose). In attempting the outer ring, students are effectively pursuing these routes and, in so doing, are developing for and by themselves critical thinking.
Providing a common language for better uptake and giving of feedback
Any quality dialogue must be based on a shared understanding of the dialogue’s terms of references. However, critical thinking is challenging. Ideas might become too abstract for students to understand. Thus, it is helpful to create a common understanding about these terms between students and teachers so there can be better uptake of feedback. This tool does just that through the use of questions that accompany the listed perspectives. Given the common goal for students to reach the outer ring, teachers can use the relevant question prompts in the outer ring to either challenge students ‘ thinking (e.g. student attempts a critical analysis of the source’s context when in actual fact there isn’t enough information to justify such an analysis) or challenge students to consider a fresh perspective-route (e.g. “Since the source is written by a person of authority and he gives a glowing account of the issue, could there be a purpose?”). As seen, the question-prompts presented in the thinking wheel could be a helpful way to provide a common language – regardless of teachers’ personal styles (e.g some prefer more conversational language as opposed to directional language) – that is understood and accepted by both students and teachers.
Reflections and Conclusion
It is critical that in developing any feedback tool that the users’ needs be considered. We prioritised the learning needs of our students, valuing their autonomy in thought (reflections) and action (choice made to pursue various perspectives), as well as the practical needs of our teachers (standardising teacher feedback). While our feedback log features dialogue most prominently, checklists and exemplars provide a concrete basis for the feedback dialogue to be based upon, and the thinking wheel provides aspirational routes for that dialogue to be possibly based upon. Regardless, having dialogues with students help us teachers to better understand their cognitive and socio-emotional learning needs. While the former challenges the validity of the student’s thinking, the latter deals with the student’s readiness and receptivity to feedback and correction. We believe that a suite of feedback tools, coupled with a range of feedback pedagogies, will put us in good stead in developing active, concerned and participative citizens who are able to discern accurately any given source of information.
References
Bennett, R.E. (2011). Formative assessment: A critical review. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice, 18 (1), 5-25.
Carless, D. (2016). Feedback as dialogue. In M.A. Peters (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational philosophy and theory (pp. 1-6). http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_389-1
Carless, D., & Boud, D. (2018). The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(8), 1315-1325.
Curriculum Planning and Development Division. (2022). Social Studies Teaching and Learning Guide, Upper Secondary Express Course and Normal (Academic) Course.
Goh, R. (2021). Designing Quality Assessment Feedback Practices in Schools. Pearson Education: Singapore.
Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81-112.
Sadler, D.R. (2010). Beyond feedback: Developing student-capability in complex appraisal. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 35(5), 535-550.
Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by Design, Alexandria, USA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Winstone, N.E., Nash, R.A., Parker, M., & Rowntree, J. (2017). Supporting Learners’ Agentic Engagement With Feedback: A Systematic Review and a Taxonomy of Recipience Processes. Educational Psychologist, 52(1), 17-37.