We kick off our second season of Let’s Talk Teaching by exploring the transformative role of feedback in education. This episode uncovers how technology is revolutionising teacher-student interactions, shifting from traditional methodologies to innovative approaches that enhance learning outcomes.
We kick off our second season of Let’s Talk Teaching by exploring the transformative role of feedback in education. This episode uncovers how technology is revolutionising teacher-student interactions, shifting from traditional methodologies to innovative approaches that enhance learning outcomes.
Join us as we unveil the nuances of educational feedback with our distinguished guests, Michael Hendersen and Dr. Matt Fyfield. Together, they discuss the pivotal role of clear, timely and actionable feedback that resonates with students, highlighting how technological tools like video and audio feedback are instrumental in enriching this process. Specifically, we delve into how the implementation of more dynamic formative assessments - such as Matt’s ‘Lightening Feedback’ model fosters continuous improvement and enhances engagement in the learning process.
Together, we explore:
This conversation is packed with practical suggestions, tips and techniques for teachers who want to start implementing effective feedback strategies into their classrooms. Join us today and Let’s Talk Teaching.
Resources:
Special Guests:
Professor Michael Hendersen
Professor of Digital Futures - Monash University
Director, Hub for Educational Design and Innovation (HEDI)
Dr. Matt Fyfield
Deputy Principal (Learning and Teaching) - Mazenod College, Mulgrave
If you’re enjoying Let’s Talk Teaching, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review! You can follow us on Instagram, X and Facebook, and share your thoughts on the show by using the hashtag #letstalkteachingpodcast
If you’re interested in hearing more about the short courses, undergraduate and postgraduate study options that Monash Education offers, please visit: Monash Education's learn more page.
We are grateful for the support of Monash University’s Faculty of Education in producing this podcast.
[00:00:00] Bec: This podcast is recorded on the land of the Boon Wurrung people of the Eastern Kulin Nation. We'd like to pay our respect to Elders past and present, and acknowledge that this land was stolen and never ceded. Welcome to Let's Talk Teaching, the podcast created by teachers for teachers. I'm Associate Professor Rebecca Cooper, Assistant Dean of Initial Teacher Education at Monash University's Faculty of Education, and I'll be your host for this series.
[00:00:28] Bec: Our aim is to create a conversational series that's informative, engaging, and relevant to your teaching practice. Joined by academics and teaching alumni from Monash University, we'll be exploring the challenges, issues, and experiences you might be facing in and out of the classroom. Drawing on their personal experiences to provide you with valuable insights into the world of teaching.
[00:00:53] Bec: This season, we'll navigate through a series of pivotal classroom topics, including transformative feedback, [00:01:00] strategies for differentiation, creating and sustaining supportive learning environments for students, the intricate relationship between students mental health and academic success, The pivotal role of literacy and developing creativity and critical thinking skills.
[00:01:16] Bec: Each episode is packed with practical strategies and insights that can be taken into your classroom. In today's episode, we delve into the critical role of feedback in education and its potential impact on learning outcomes. Joining us to share their experiences are two exceptional guests. Michael Henderson, Professor of Digital Futures at Monash University, alongside Dr.
[00:01:38] Bec: Matt Fifield, Deputy Principal for Learning and Teaching at Mazinod College. Together we discuss key feedback principles, the various forms of feedback, highlighting the role of technology and the pivotal shift from summative assessment to more frequent formative assessment. Let's get started. Welcome, Michael and [00:02:00] Matt, and thanks for joining me to kick off the season.
[00:02:03] Bec: Michael, I'm going to start with you. What led you to start exploring feedback and its effectiveness in the classroom?
[00:02:11] Michael: Well, as a teacher, feedback is a core part of our practice. So, I've always been interested in trying to improve my own feedback. But the thing that really kicked me off in terms of research and trying to understand what makes feedback effective is when I started to play with different forms of feedback using video, using audio, using imagery, using a whole heap of things, including Christmas cards as part of my teaching feedback.
[00:02:37] Michael: And I found that the students really responded in different ways. I always knew the feedback was important, but the kind of emotional reaction that students would have and the way that they would sort of commit to different tasks by the way in which I communicated with them, changing the media that I used through to the kinds of messaging and that really then kicked me off into thinking, okay, I need to know more.
[00:02:58] Michael: So I started to research it.
[00:02:59] Bec: So [00:03:00] when we're talking about. All those different modes and all that sort of thing around feedback. What actually is feedback?
[00:03:07] Michael: That's a really good question.
[00:03:08] Bec: Thanks, I'll try. Okay,
[00:03:10] Michael: often we would think about feedback as this thing that we, as teachers, give to students. That's what we would call an input model of feedback.
[00:03:18] Michael: And over the last couple of decades, there's been a bit of a shift. Because when you think about it, feedback as an input model where teachers give this precious information to students. Really, that's a teacher centered approach. And in education these days, you know, we've moved away from the teacher center to realizing that actually learning occurs within the student.
[00:03:36] Michael: Our role as a teacher is to create these stimulus or these interesting environments by which students can react and learn and grow. So when we think about feedback from that point of view as a learner centered process, then what we'd need to recognize that feedback is a process process. At which the students are at the center, where they have to make sense of information that's coming at them, which might be part of what you're doing [00:04:00] as a teacher, you're giving them some information, right?
[00:04:02] Michael: But it's the students who are acting upon that information and trying to figure out how to improve. So feedback is a learner centered process in which the students are making sense of information about their performance and trying to improve. And as teachers, we get to input into that, but we're not the center of that.
[00:04:20] Bec: Amazing. Amazing. So, Matt. And why is feedback just so important?
[00:04:25] Matt: It's important because we as teachers don't nail it the first time. And I think when we, we think about feedback, we've got to ask about the purpose of education to begin with. Now, um, we could, we could go very broad and philosophical about that, but if we bring it back to its most granular level, there's some stuff or some skills that we want students to be able to know or do internally to do that learning.
[00:04:47] Matt: We want to release gradually. our sense of control to, uh, to the point where the student's got control and they've got mastery of that skill or that knowledge and they can use that and apply it to the real world. That sounds like [00:05:00] a pretty basic version of what we're trying to do in education. And we just don't nail that the first time.
[00:05:05] Matt: If we could, probably wouldn't need teachers, probably wouldn't need mass schooling system. It would be easy. You'd stick a textbook in front of a kid and bingo, bingo, you'd have a fully educated, fully formed. We don't. Um, we know students come in with misconceptions. We know that students come in and the first way we explain something, you know, horrible to admit, but sometimes us teachers, we don't choose the right example or we don't choose the right resource.
[00:05:31] Matt: The student doesn't understand it the first time. How will we know? And that's the, that's a big question. How will we know that the student understands it? And when they don't, How are we going to assist in the continual moving towards that release of control and mastery? And that's where feedback comes in.
[00:05:48] Bec: So speaking to both of you here, and feel free to talk to each other, what do we know works well in classrooms when it comes to feedback?
[00:05:56] Michael: I think I can probably offer a few ideas around some key [00:06:00] principles that are important. So first of all, what we need to recognize is that because feedback is this learner centered kind of process.
[00:06:09] Michael: The information that students receive needs to be understandable, needs to be clear, needs to be explicit, needs to be something that they can recognize as being relevant to them. So very generic commentaries is not really very effective feedback information. We also know that students need it early. You know, what's the point of giving some feedback after, um, all the assessment's been done and it's towards the end of a, of a course?
[00:06:32] Michael: So, um, if we think about feedback as a way to constantly improve, then it needs to be early, needs to be frequent. It needs to be clear.
[00:06:41] Matt: And I think Michael, you make a really good point there about what I like to call the grammar of education. And so for so long, the grammar, the structure of education has been teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, assess, dump that next unit, teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, assess.
[00:06:57] Matt: The feedback then has taken the form [00:07:00] of some sort of summative comment, some sort of well done Jimmy or unlucky Janine, and then we move on. And there's no point at which that feedback is enacted. Dylan William asks two really good questions about feedback. Uh, one, what do your students do with it? And two, how do you know?
[00:07:19] Matt: And I think if we ask those questions, we're asking really powerful questions about what kind of feedback works. Um, is it, as Michael says, timely enough that they can actually do something about it. And, uh, I might as well talk about it now. Um, my, my role as, as a deputy principal of learning and teaching is, if I can encapsulate that in two words, it's to empower teachers.
[00:07:40] Matt: One of the things I've been empowering teachers to do is to scrap their summative feedback, just not have it at all. Give them a grade. Fine. No problems. We've got to manage that teacher workload. And so we can't just keep asking teachers to do more and more and more and more. What I've asked them or empowered them to do is to make the choice to give some formative feedback along the way and kind of [00:08:00] reshift that teacher workload from the endpoint to that process, that iterative process along the way that brings teachers on board because I'm not asking them to do another thing, but it focuses on the most important thing about feedback, which is I've got to be able to do something with it.
[00:08:14] Bec: So then what might that look like in a classroom, Matt?
[00:08:16] Matt: One of the things that we, we often confuse, I think, is that feedback, we think of the formal feedback and that's really important. But most of the feedback that a teacher and a student will engage in, in a standard classroom, when we're thinking of a standard classroom, we're not thinking of that online classroom, we're thinking of a real classroom.
[00:08:32] Matt: You know, 20 something students and a teacher in a room, uh, and, uh, most of that is the relational work that we do in terms of us, uh, walking around to a desk and giving the encouragement, et cetera. But coming back to something more formal, it could involve a short video. Now many LMSs, learning management systems, now allow teachers to record videos directly in the LMS that we use.
[00:08:57] Matt: A student can put a draft in and we can click on [00:09:00] a point in that draft and record a video straight into that. Now that could be literally 15 to 20 seconds of video and there's a huge amount of feedback that feeds into that. Um, we've been experimenting with a type of feedback called, uh, lightning code feedback.
[00:09:15] Matt: My title, anyone listening to the podcast, please contact me and come up with a better title. We're by, we're, we're trying to focus on, um, frequency of feedback, and if you're focusing on frequency of feedback, you've got to look at teacher workload. How do we reduce that, um, such that, uh, we can give, um, Lots of students, lots of feedback, lots of the time.
[00:09:38] Matt: And one of the things we've been doing, uh, is, uh, devising as teaching teams, sitting down and asking the question, what are the misconceptions that students are likely to make in this particular task and coding those. Now this sounds, um, Very unrelational, but, uh, and we code them, for example, we know that in writing an essay about a text, an English text, [00:10:00] quite regularly a student will make a claim about a character, but not back it up with any textual detail.
[00:10:04] Matt: So we know that. And so the code might be TD for textual detail. We know that in a mathematics class, it might be that the student doesn't show they're working. We know that that's really common. And so we device codes for that and we give on the, on the work, it might be literally two letters. Next to a little part of the work, and that there might be three or four of those, and um, and that constitutes some feedback that can take literally a minute to two minutes for the teacher, but become a powerful learning experience in class.
[00:10:35] Bec: So then how do the students make sense of that sort of feedback? What do they do with it?
[00:10:39] Matt: If that's all we did. If that's what we left it as, I think that'd be pretty ordinary feedback. We come back to Dylan Williams questions. What do the students do with it and how do you know? Uh, so in my class, every time I've given a bit of that lightning feedback, it might be that I've done it.
[00:10:53] Matt: The night before and the students walk into the class, open yesterday's homework, have a look at the, the [00:11:00] feedback codes. You've got three minutes to ask, what do you learn from those feedback codes? Two minutes to talk to the student next to you and find out if you've got any similarities. And then I have a break.
[00:11:12] Matt: a nice big digital wheel and I spin the wheel. It's called wheel decide. I have no connection with the company that runs it, but wheel decide, W H E E L, have a look at it teachers. Uh, and it spins up a few students and they know there's a protocol where they have to talk back to me. The thing about the codes is that they're the same for each page.
[00:11:30] Matt: task, we try and keep them as consistent as possible. So if I'm a student and it comes to the end of a few weeks and I ask the student, what's the feedback code you've been getting most often? And it's that TD textual detail. Well, we know what we're focusing on coming into your next SAC, your next summative assessment.
[00:11:46] Matt: Us teachers tend to use a lot of synonyms for things. And therefore, if we're talking in terms of cognitive load, a student's trying to think of, uh, have you got a quote? Is there textual detail? Anything from the text? Can you think of the amount of [00:12:00] different ways that we would say the same thing? And this poor young person is trying to work out that they're all the same thing.
[00:12:06] Bec: All right. So I'm, I'm guessing there's probably quite a few impacts here on both the teaching and the learning that's happening when, when this is the way that a classroom is run. Can you talk me through that a little bit? What are you saying? Okay.
[00:12:16] Matt: Yeah, well, for starters, the young people, uh, speaking to each other about their work and their feedback.
[00:12:21] Matt: Uh, yeah, I got this one. Oh, did you get that one too? Often the, the feedback. Uh, particularly in that old grammar of education of teach, teach, teach, assess, there's not a lot of collaborative work in terms of improving each other's work. So, so that's one of the big shifts. The other big shift is every one of those little low stakes tasks becomes meaningful.
[00:12:45] Matt: Instead of just something I do to tick the box, I now know someone's going to care about it. Someone's going to look at it. Someone's going to give me feedback on it.
[00:12:53] Bec: Fantastic. So how do you go about empowering your staff? You said that's the summary of your job. [00:13:00] How do you go about empowering staff to start to think a bit differently about feedback?
[00:13:05] Matt: Yeah, well, starters is having the right tools. Um, now when I first started, now I'm going to give a bit of credit to Michael and our great colleague. Colleague, Mike Phillips, who, who wrote an article called video feedback, scarily personal. It is the best title for a, um, for an article I've ever read. And, uh, this is, this is where we're moving on from lightning codes.
[00:13:26] Matt: Really got to think of a better name, um, to the, uh, to the idea of video feedback, which I'll let Michael take on from here. Um, You have to have the tools. When I first started, I was using a program called Screencast O Matic. I was using my own camera. I was recording. It was, it was clunky. Now I'm reading the student's work.
[00:13:42] Matt: I click once and the video starts straight away. I can ask a teacher to do that because I've got the tools in place. Now that's my job as an educational leader, not the teacher's job to, to source those tools. The other thing we can do is clearly, consistently give permission to do things that once upon a time would have been [00:14:00] heresy.
[00:14:01] Matt: To mark work, a summative essay and not give a comment sounds like something that when we started teaching, uh, I'm making, uh, suggestions here, uh, that, uh, that wouldn't have been thinkable. So it's giving permission to teachers to de implement things that we know don't work, summative written comments.
[00:14:21] Matt: They're not particularly useful, and implement something in their place that we know does work.
[00:14:26] Bec: So Michael, what are some of those other tools that exist that could support a bit of a shift for teachers in thinking about feedback?
[00:14:34] Michael: I think the tools are far less important than the conceptual tools. So the digital tools are less important.
[00:14:39] Michael: They are important. Important in, in some ways, but coming back to conceptual tools that, that you've been playing with there, Matt, in order to really support staff of all stages to, to adopt these kind of things, I think it is decoupling and breaking open some of our misconceptions around feedback. First of all, this idea, you know, every assessment piece needs to [00:15:00] have feedback comments.
[00:15:00] Michael: But if that feedback, that commentary, that information is not stimulating some action that is, that can be taken up, what's the point? It's not feedback, right? It's just fulfilling some strange tradition that we have. So yeah. So let's break that up. Well done
[00:15:17] Matt: Michael. That's, that's often what the feedback is, isn't
[00:15:20] Michael: it?
[00:15:20] Michael: Well done. You've done really well.
[00:15:23] Matt: That's not fair. So what? How can they act upon it? Yeah. So
[00:15:25] Michael: we need students to be able to make sense of the comments, be able to take up action based on those comments, and be able to make sense of, well, is this making a change? Because that self regulation is going to be the thing that is the lifelong learner.
[00:15:38] Michael: So with that in mind, we can take away that idea of these summative pieces must have comments, so we can take that time elsewhere and put it into those earlier, um, formative pieces as you were talking about. But there's another thing as well. We often assume. That there's feedback commentary and, and often this isn't written sort of in policy, but it's, but it's an assumption that you have to justify [00:16:00] the grade.
[00:16:00] Michael: And so feedback doesn't become feedback anymore. It's actually all about justifying the grade. It's a teacher saying, Hey, this is why you got this score. That's not feedback. That's assessment. That's grading. That's what your rubric does. And all you're doing is you're offering extra commentary, which is explaining the rubric.
[00:16:18] Michael: That's not feedback. That's assessment, right? So what we need to do is break open this idea that, that marking and feedback, they work often side by side, but they are not the same thing. So marking is making a judgment of quality and saying, this is where I think you're at. And we have tools like rubrics to do that.
[00:16:38] Michael: Then we have feedback, which is, Hey, in my expert opinion, looking at your work, I think You might want to work on this, this and this for these particular reasons to improve this kind of thing in the future.
[00:16:50] Matt: There's a question there as to who does the intellectual heavy lifting, um, for each one of them.
[00:16:55] Matt: And, and it's, it's my job when I'm marking, when I'm doing the grading, that's my job. When it's the [00:17:00] feedback. Well, while I want the student to be doing the intellectual heavy lifting and asking the questions and making those, improving those mental models, one of the best mathematics teachers I know sometimes does feedback that includes circling a particular part of the equation or the, whatever it is, insert mathematical speak here, uh, and simply writing, have you done this?
[00:17:20] Matt: And that's the feedback for that particular equation, which might be quite a significant piece of work. And all it is is one step. Have you done this now? That's very different to do this, do this, do this. It's very different from you got seven out of 10. Cause you failed to do this. It's a question that requires some sort of intellectual heavy lifting from the learner rather than just all the work being.
[00:17:44] Matt: Done by the teacher.
[00:17:47] Bec: Hey there. Just wanted to jump in and see that you're enjoying this conversation. And if it's got you interested in exploring the latest technologies and how they will impact the future of education, you could head over to our [00:18:00] website and discover more about our new Bachelor of Learning and Design Technology.
[00:18:04] Bec: You could also explore our range of postgraduate and short course study options while you're there too. Take the first step to enrolling in these incredible programs by visiting monash. edu. au forward slash education forward slash learn more. Now let's jump back into the show. So if you're starting to think about feedback in these sorts of ways, it's going to change the way you're going to operate in the classroom, possibly change the way you plan for teaching and learning, and possibly change the way you work with your colleagues.
[00:18:38] Bec: So. What might this look like in terms of planning or thinking about how you work together as a, as a team of colleagues?
[00:18:46] Michael: I can talk about some of the practice ideas and, and, uh, I think maybe you can talk about how to lead a team, which I don't do in schools anymore.
[00:18:53] Matt: I've taught on a team with Michael.
[00:18:55] Matt: He's an excellent team member. Thank you.
[00:18:58] Michael: [00:19:00] Um, so I think one of the big changes, and it's not, it's not a huge change. But it's sort of, uh, crystallizes a few things. Like we all know that getting students to do things in class or to talk about what they've done and share it with each other, share it with us and have this kind of visible sense of performance as opposed to the classical idea of the teacher sort of just, you know, Just banging on in a classroom, but if we're getting students to do more things performing in all the varieties, whether it's working out a bit of a mathematical speak here kind of moment or some other thing going on, then it gives you the opportunities, gives you those data points.
[00:19:39] Michael: For you, for them, for peers to react, to do something with it. And so all of a sudden then our planning, you know, all the curriculum, all our activities, we're not working towards that teach, teach, teach, big assessment piece. We're going, how can I get students to do things, to show things? How can I get them to show me something or show each other or show themselves something [00:20:00] every lesson?
[00:20:01] Michael: And so it puts that, that emphasis back on that active learning. So it's not a brand new idea. But with the point of feedback at it, it sort of crystallizes why you're doing and why it might be valuable.
[00:20:12] Matt: Part of what you have to do as a team is to sit down and do a little bit of that pre work about it used to be teach, teach, teach, assess.
[00:20:19] Matt: How do we break that assessment down? Are there sub skills? Are there, is there sub knowledge within that final goal, that learning goal that we want them to have mastery of that we can, um, give feedback along the way? If we draw on cognitive load theory, how do we chunk that down to a manageable, you know, So that's one task that I can give feedback on at the start.
[00:20:38] Matt: The other thing is that we need to have a really good and solid think about what would be an accurate proxy for this particular learning. Now that's fancy speak for we can't see inside each other's brains. It's that problem of other minds. We don't know what's going on. So what we try to do when we're designing assessment is to give the closest proxy for learning as we possibly can.
[00:20:59] Matt: Now if I'm a [00:21:00] PE teacher and I want to teach students to throw, then the closest proxy for that. It's getting them to have a ball and videoing them throw a ball. It's much harder with an abstract concept, but the, the closer our proxy is to the learning. Now, I remember an assessment task I did once upon a time, and it was a, an assessment task getting students to look at the impact of bullying in, in schools.
[00:21:23] Matt: And the final assessment task was to listen to a song by Kate Miller, High Key, and analyze it. The worst proxy for learning I could possibly imagine. When we have a really close look at what are our assessments and then we can break them down into sub parts and build students up giving them feedback along the way, that's hard work as a teaching team.
[00:21:47] Matt: Once you've set it up then actually the work of teaching becomes quite easy because here's a small chunk task, I'm giving really quick feedback on it and as we build up, um, our students get closer and closer to mastery.
[00:21:58] Bec: So is it also [00:22:00] changing the way that your students are talking about their learning?
[00:22:03] Matt: I happen to teach because I'm a deputy principal. Unfortunately, I don't get as much. Uh, class time as I'd love and I, I've got a unit three, four class. That's my only class for those listening outside of Victoria. That means a year 12 top level examinable subject. So my students are pretty keyed into where they're shooting for and where they're heading for and how to get X number of marks on, on a question.
[00:22:24] Matt: But certainly breaking down that feedback, one of the big things I find is. students having far more iterations at things than they used to because there's more small points of feedback. I'll have a student who will do the formal tasks that's required, get that little bit of feedback. And the next day there comes another version of it for me to have a look at.
[00:22:44] Matt: Is it right now? Am I getting it now? Do I understand it now? And so that's probably different. It used to be, I'll wait till the Wait till the summative.
[00:22:52] Bec: So there's more exchange between you and the student, is that changing the conversations you're having with students?
[00:22:58] Matt: Certainly I know that [00:23:00] video feedback changes that conversation, so I'm going to let Michael talk about that for a little bit before I pipe in again.
[00:23:05] Bec: That's all right. So how does it change that conversation then if you're using video feedback?
[00:23:10] Michael: So I've done a fair amount of work looking at different digital technologies and supporting the feedback process, particularly in supporting the teacher, offering comments to students, which is only part of that process, remember.
[00:23:24] Michael: One of the things I've found is that with video. Which can sound quite confronting to a teacher to say, Oh, I'm going to video myself talking about a student's work. But think of it as in, you often can't have these quiet moments with your individual students or small groups of students in class. So it's just taking this moment of going, I've looked at something that they've done.
[00:23:43] Michael: Uh, it could be a, a formal assessment or it could be just something that they've done in that, in class, so taking this a formative, um, process. You've looked at it and so you've got a choice now. How do I give some feedback commentary on this work? You could write it, you could, you know, and it takes a while.
[00:23:59] Michael: I'm an [00:24:00] old English teacher, so for me to write even a small thing, it takes a while because I want to get it just right and I'll edit it and I'll think about it and I'll add in some links. But actually, when you think about it, if you can treat it like a conversation and you just hit record. In this case on a video, you can have a couple of minutes chat, or shorter, and the pure volume of information that you are conveying is far greater than you would normally type anyway.
[00:24:25] Michael: But you're also conveying it with such emotion, you know, uh, you know, you're making a connection with the students, you're picking up where you've left off with them in the last conversation. And so what we've found is that it can be really sustainable in terms of it can be fast. It can be rich and students really appreciate it.
[00:24:42] Michael: We've surveyed school students, we've surveyed university students and, uh, inevitably students seem to be really recognizing that there's a connection there with their teacher. They're appreciating that, that commentary and they talk about feeling like they can act upon it.
[00:24:57] Matt: The other conversation that's radically shifted [00:25:00] using video feedback and other kinds of technology enhanced feedback is the parent student relationship.
[00:25:07] Matt: conversation. I could not believe how much feedback I got. Myself as a teacher, the first time I went away and recorded a little video for every one of my students and I got seven or eight emails back the next day. We watched this together. I can't believe it. This is great. This is the first time I've sat down with my, now, My school happens to be a boys school, so I sat down with my son and, and talked through, um, through his learning.
[00:25:32] Matt: Thank you so much for the effort you put in. And, and I thought, well, they're not doing that with the little comment at the end of the essay. I've started now recording very little videos and sending them to the parents instead. What's coming up is X, Y, and Z. You'll find this a really great conversation to have around the table might be, this historical event that we're about to study.
[00:25:54] Matt: Here's a little tip if you want to be a great parent. Feign naivety and get your son to [00:26:00] explain it to you. And then all I'll do is, uh, we've got on our LMS, we can email all parents and I'll email a link to that video. That's taken me a minute, a minute and a half to record. I send it with a little two line email to the parents.
[00:26:13] Matt: There's five minutes of my day gone and I've got half of my parents who are now engaged in the learning process. There's an extra bit of feedback. There's an extra study opportunity around the, uh, the table. So they're the kind of things that changing the grammar of schooling, changing the When we do the feedback, who we give it to can have impacts beyond just the teacher student relationship.
[00:26:34] Michael: I love that idea. I mean, being a parent myself, but also noting that I'm a professor in education and I'm an old school teacher and I know my way around the classroom. And yet I constantly find that I'm a little bit further, too far apart from my own daughter's education. I really appreciate those small nuggets when a teacher reaches out and says, Hey, you might want to be doing this with your child or this is what we're doing in class now.
[00:26:59] Michael: [00:27:00] So I think it's something that's a really wonderful thing to do. And I've never thought of, uh, using video or other media for it, but, uh, yeah, I fully encourage that. That's a brilliant idea.
[00:27:08] Matt: Might be a little bit odd at the tertiary level, I'd think.
[00:27:14] Michael: I think a lot of parents and carers, you know, educators around those, those children are looking for those hints about going, how can we support the people we care?
[00:27:23] Matt: We run a, an evening each year. Where we deliberately do it online. And the idea is have your dinner as a family and then come and watch the, the feed, um, and then, uh, interact with some of our high performing students from last year and ask them how they went about study, et cetera.
[00:27:38] Matt: And it's, it's bringing that conversation, which for so long, the, the classroom was so opaque, the teacher work was mysterious and all we imagined teachers to be is. what we suffered through or were the beneficiaries of when we went to school. So I think part of that feedback conversation is around how do we, how do we build in those who [00:28:00] love and care for our students as well.
[00:28:01] Bec: So Matt, thinking about all the work that you and your staff have done around feedback, has it sort of changed the relationship you've got with the students in the classroom?
[00:28:10] Matt: Yeah, look, Some of the teacher's work is performative. Um, we're, we're in front of a large group of people and, and sometimes that's in presentation of information and, and look, there's, there's the fun banter in classrooms, but it's, it tends to be collective.
[00:28:25] Matt: Look, my lightning feedback codes are about encouraging a particular protocol the next day in class and getting them to do that intellectual heavy lifting, but the video feedback, that technology mediated feedback is really at times quite intimate in the best possible way between a student. and a teacher.
[00:28:42] Matt: There is a, there are things you can say in a video you cannot write in a comment. Something like, come on, mate, we discussed this. I reckon you can do, you can't write, come on, mate, in a comment, but you can in a video. And therefore there's that relational work, the relational [00:29:00] stuff that's hard. It's really hard for a teacher in 45, 50 minutes to form great relationships with 28 people and deliver content and give feedback and, but that little couple of minutes, that student knows it was made for them and it was made for them as a gift and it's there and they're the only audience for it.
[00:29:20] Matt: And it's a really powerful statement we're making to a young person that took me no No longer than an impersonal comment.
[00:29:26] Michael: So in all of our research, we've, we've consistently seen that video and audio feedback somehow results in students saying that they have a stronger sense of rapport, that they have this kind of connection with their teacher.
[00:29:41] Michael: And interestingly enough, we often have the comments where it says that they, uh, think that the, the information is more truthful, which is quite funny because I can't imagine any teacher. Ever writing an untruthful comment, but what I think this is, is they're recognizing this kind of [00:30:00] sense of genuine connection.
[00:30:02] Michael: And so they're more willing to accept, and we know a couple of things about feedback. One, that if students have a stronger connection with the teacher and feeling more resilient, they have more trust in the teacher, then they are more willing to take harder things to hear and they will be more productive with it.
[00:30:18] Michael: But if they're feeling at risk, if they're feeling at risk in, in danger, then there's less likely to, to take that up. They're going to sort of react in bad ways. So one of the things we need to do is make sure that they can hear the message we're trying to give and say, let's do everything we can to build that strength of relationship.
[00:30:35] Michael: One of the other things that we've noticed, particularly with students who, uh, may be working, um, in English as a second language in the context of this research, is that they're using every. symbol, every bit of information at their disposal to understand what's going on here. And so in the written text, often we use this thing and we do it in audio and video as well, this thing called the feedback sandwich, right?[00:31:00]
[00:31:00] Michael: Where we might say a nice thing, and then we'll say the real stuff, the hard stuff, and then we'll finish off with a nice thing. Well, you know, this kind of formula, It's really problematic because it's, it's been shown that some students, really at the end of the day, they're recognising there's this formula and they're recognising the bit at the beginning and the bit at the end, the teacher, well they suddenly get this idea that that isn't what the teacher cares about because it's the bit in the middle, the hard to hear stuff, seems to be the thing that's connected to their results.
[00:31:30] Michael: And so they start to actually report to us. That they're feeling that they don't have as much trust in the teacher. Because they're feeling like the teacher is not quite always being honest. So be careful of that kind of messaging. And you know, using the audio and video can sort of increase that sense of genuine connection.
[00:31:48] Michael: But be careful of any formulas that you might fall into. It
[00:31:50] Bec: actually makes me think more about how you, you work with that as a teacher and what feedback it gives you about [00:32:00] what your students need more of, uh, about what you're going to do next with them that's actually going to continue to be supportive in the classroom.
[00:32:09] Bec: So you've given all of that individual feedback, but in a sense it's feedback for you. Um, and so. When you were saying before, Matt, about this, you know, you need to give it more often and in smaller bits, I can sort of see that shifting the way the teacher then operates in the classroom in terms of the way, um, you then plan a unit.
[00:32:32] Bec: I think you'd do less planning upfront and be more responsive to the needs of your students in class.
[00:32:39] Matt: Absolutely. And there's, there's so much, I wish we had another hour and we could talk about it. Um, I will never ask a question of my class, even, even after I've come back with the feedback codes and I won't say, does everyone get this?
[00:32:54] Matt: Useless, pointless questions. They'll, they'll either say yes or they'll say nothing. I make sure every, every student [00:33:00] contributes to that. Hold up a hand. Now, for those listening to the podcast, I'm now holding up my hand with five fingers up, out of five. Easier understanding on this five means move on fire field.
[00:33:09] Matt: We're done. Yeah. One means I've got no idea what you're talking about. And so when we pair powerful feedback strategies for the student and back the other way, that's when education is happening. That's when we're shifting from me being the boss to a gradual release of control into the student being the master in the dialogue that is education rather than a one directional.
[00:33:31] Bec: So we've heard a lot about the work that's going on in your school, the fantastic work that's going on in your school in shifting the way that your students and teachers are working with feedback. So if I'm a teacher out there and I'm listening to the podcast, where do I start?
[00:33:46] Matt: I quoted him before, Dylan William.
[00:33:48] Matt: His, his work on feedback is fantastic. The intellectual heavy lifting, um, line that I used is also his, his work is really good and it's really pithy and it gives lots of really good ideas as to how to do so [00:34:00] manageably. Um, that's a good start. Read, um, Read, uh, video feedback scarily personal, that's a, that's a great one, but I think it's having a conversation with your leaders at school, if you're a teacher, around about what's permissible and what's not.
[00:34:16] Matt: So often teachers, all of us, we play school and we play that, what does school look like? School looks like handing in essays and getting grades. Have those conversations around, Oh, I heard this idea of shifting. Would you mind if I tried it? Nine times out of 10, you're going to get a yes. So, be brave and have a crack.
[00:34:35] Michael: I think, uh, in addition to all the ideas that Matt's offered, uh, just do some searching for resources around audio and video feedback. You'll find some resources that we've created, but also, um, it's becoming a far more common kind of approach. But I think, regardless of that, just, you know, Keep remembering that it's not the tool that makes the difference.
[00:34:54] Michael: It's the design principles, the kinds of things you do with it, you know, who's involved and what are you putting in the content. [00:35:00] Some things to keep in mind when you start down this path of going feedback can be anything that's really helping the learner to understand how they're progressing and to act upon it.
[00:35:11] Michael: So it can come in a lot of different forms. The lightning feedback that Matt's talked about, the audio and video feedback that I've talked about. It has to be early, it has to be frequent, but it can also be in other forms such as getting students to write or do action plans based on their performances.
[00:35:27] Michael: So they're creating sort of a feedback cycle for themselves. There's so many different strategies. But yeah, I think one of the real powerful things to do would be to find some peers, some, you know, a community of inquiry or community of practice and start to build up some practices together and to, to iterate, to play and know you're not going to get it first, first time, uh, you know, perfect.
[00:35:49] Matt: And first step of everything in education, I think, find what's not working and stop doing it. Cause then you've got space to do something else.
[00:35:57] Bec: Very good advice. Thank you both so much for a [00:36:00] really, really exciting conversation. Thanks.
[00:36:02] Michael: Thank you.
[00:36:04] Bec: For those inspired to revolutionize their feedback practices, remember the journey begins with simple steps.
[00:36:11] Bec: Seeking out resources, engaging in dialogue with your peers, and being open to experimenting with new approaches. In Episode 2 of Let's Talk Teaching, we discuss differentiation and how we can truly understand and meet the diverse needs of every student. Join us as Dr Penny Round and teacher Maddy Curtin guide us through creating connections in the classroom.
[00:36:35] Bec: We've included a wealth of practical resources in our show notes that support your teaching journey. Be sure to check them out. If you're enjoying the show, don't forget to subscribe, rate and review, and follow us on Instagram at Monash underscore education, X at Monash education, and Facebook at Education Monash.
[00:36:55] Bec: And tell us what you thought of today's episode using the hashtag Let's Talk [00:37:00] Teaching podcast. We are grateful for the support of Monash University's Faculty of Education in producing this podcast. For more information on short courses and undergraduate and postgraduate study options, head to monash.
[00:37:13] Bec: edu. au forward slash education forward slash learn more. Thanks again for listening to Let's Talk Teaching.