Talking Teaching: Giving Supportive and Effective Feedback

This post developed from a Blog Contributor who presented for the Talking Teaching discussion series hosted by the APA Committee on Teaching.

Talking Teaching is an initiative of the APA Committee on Teaching Philosophy aimed at providing a space for philosophers to talk about the practice of teaching. On April 19, I facilitated an online conversation focused on giving supportive and effective feedback attended by five participants from a variety of contexts and with differing teaching loads.

Overview

The session began with an overview of some principles of good feedback practice. I suggested that good feedback should:

1. Be aligned with the goals for the course. We should give feedback on things we care about and not on things we don’t.
2. Be written for students with the aim of promoting learning (i.e. feedback should not be primarily about grade justification).
3. To not be overwhelming, effective feedback often focuses on one or two things to work on at a time that would move a student from where they are to a little closer to where we hope they will be by the end of the course.
4. Be situated in a metacognitive framework. Students need opportunities to reflect on particular feedback and also on the purpose of feedback in general.
5. Focus on process. Effective feedback helps students to understand their development as writers/thinkers as an ongoing practice.
6. Be motivating and promote a growth mindset. Motivation comes in part from a belief that improvement is possible.
7. Be personalized and connected to prior feedback (if possible).
8. Involve students in an ongoing conversation. Students need the opportunity to follow up on feedback and ask questions.

After this overview, our conversation turned to two key questions: 1) How can we grade effectively and efficiently? 2) How can we motivate students to read, process, and incorporate feedback into their work?

Grading Efficiently

Our discussion of efficiency led immediately to a discussion of rubrics. Many of the participants in the conversation have heavy teaching loads and found rubrics to be an important part of their feedback practice, insofar as they can make grading more efficient and fair. But we also discussed the difficulty of clarifying in rubrics exactly what it is that we are looking for in student work. We discussed how some aspects of an assignment are clear-cut and easily described in a rubric (the presence of a thesis statement, the use of textual support, etc.) but that there are aspects of philosophical writing that we find much more difficult to describe and articulate. What do we really mean, for example, when we tell students that their arguments need to be “substantial” or “sophisticated” or “thoughtful”?

Participants offered some suggestions for how to help students understand our expectations such as providing examples of work by other students and also giving students specific and concrete strategies for developing their arguments. That is, rather than simply telling students that their arguments need to be more sophisticated or substantial, we discussed the importance of telling students how to deepen their thinking by giving them concrete strategies (consider an objection, question the validity of a premise, identify an assumption, etc.) as well as practice implementing these strategies over time.

In addition to discussing rubrics as a means of more efficiently giving feedback, we also discussed specifications grading. This mode of grading is one in which all assignments are pass/fail and a student earns a grade based on the kind and number of assignments that they satisfactorily complete. Specifications grading, like the use of rubrics, can be helpful for increasing transparency and lessening anxiety for students. Furthermore, because assignments are pass/fail, instructors spend less time worrying about the fairness of minor distinctions between grades and can focus more on giving substantive feedback aimed at student learning. In this way, specifications grading may also help in making grading more fair and efficient.

Motivating Students

For the second half of our discussion, we turned to a conversation about student motivation. Participants found that it can be difficult to motivate students (and especially general education students) to care about and make use of the feedback that we provide. Some solutions we discussed included creating assignments that require students to reflect on feedback, as well as making assignments more authentic to the interests and concerns of students. Some participants also suggested that having conversations with students can be more helpful than providing written feedback, although we recognized that not all students are interested in, able to, or feel comfortable coming to office hours.

As another strategy for motivating students, we also discussed the use of games. While this topic seemed at first to move us away from the topic of feedback, it, in fact, led us to think about feedback in a new way. Games, in a sense, are feedback mechanisms.  Playing games involves experiences of productive failure through which players learn how to better play the game.  And games provide the experience of this kind of failure in a low-stakes context of play. In this way, games seem to provide a good way of giving students feedback such that they can experience failure without losing motivation.

Concluding Remarks

As our discussion of games led us away from, and then back to, the topic of feedback, our conversation ended with a bit of meta-reflection on our conversation as a whole. We realized that talking about feedback, in fact, had led us to talk about all kinds of other things – clarifying our goals as instructors, assignment design, student motivation, and more. Our conversation revealed how a discussion about feedback is necessarily embedded in broader discussions of who our students are, the contexts in which we teach, and what our goals are as philosophy teachers. As happens in so many conversations about teaching, we found that each part of good teaching practice is intertwined with every other, and it is this interconnectedness that makes these conversations so fascinating, complicated, and important for us to continue having.

Further Resources

Alignment and Integrated Course Design

• Fink, L. Dee. Creating Significant Learning Experiences:An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013.

Motivation

• Eyler, Joshua R. How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2018.
• Green, Paul. “How to Motivate Students: A Primer for Learner Centered Teachers” AAPT Studies in Pedagogy. vol. 1, 2015.
• Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Ballantine Books, 2006.

Formative Assessment and Metacognition

• Lunsford, Ronald. “When Less is More: Principles for Responding in the Disciplines.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning, vol. 69, March 1997, pp. 91-104.
• Nicol, David J. and Debra Macfarlane-Dick. “Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice.” Studies in Higher Education. vol. 31, No. 2, April 2006, pp. 199-218.
• Sadler, D. Royce. “Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems, Instructional Science, vol 18, No. 2, June 1989,  pp. 119-144.

Rubrics

• Pandero, Ernesto and Anders Jonsson. “The use of scoring rubrics for formative assessment purposes revisited: A review.” Educational Research Review. vol 9, 2013, pp. 129-144.

Rebecca Scott

Assistant Professor at Harper College

Rebecca Scott is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harper College and tabletop game enthusiast. Her research interests lie at the intersections of philosophy and pedagogy.