How To Give Effective Feedback To Your Students?

Giving feedback is an essential part of teaching. It helps you identify areas where students are struggling and gives them the opportunity to improve their skills.

However, giving effective feedback is not always easy. Here are some tips on how to give effective feedback.

Feedback is a two way street. If you want to get better at giving feedback then you should also learn how to receive feedback.

• Be specific about what you’re trying to achieve with the student. What do they need to know? How can I help them understand it?
• Focus on strengths rather than weaknesses. Students will be more motivated if you focus on things that they have done well instead of things that they haven’t.
• Don’t criticise or blame – just provide constructive criticism. This means focusing on ways in which the student could make improvements without blaming them for being bad learners.

Proper feedback should enable and inspire.

Always give student feedback proactive method. You must tell them why you think something has been good or bad so that they can use this information to work out what needs improving.

Give positive reinforcement when appropriate. Praising someone’s efforts encourages them to continue working hard.

If you’re unsure whether praise is appropriate, ask yourself: “Would my parents say this?”

Remember that everyone learns differently. Don’t assume that all students learn best through lectures and tests.

Encourage students to take responsibility for themselves by asking questions like: “What would you like me to explain next time?”

Ask open-ended questions such as: “How did you feel after reading chapter 3? Why was that important to read?”

Remember that learning isn’t linear. Learning doesn’t happen only during class hours. Encouraging students to reflect on their own experiences outside of school will encourage them to develop new ideas and strategies.

Other proper ways to give form of feedback to your students 

There are several different methods you can use to provide feedback to your students.

These methods are helpful because they allow you to focus on certain aspects of their performance, rather than being distracted by other issues.

Mark with student feedback can be used to highlight key points from a lesson. For example, you might mark a few sentences or paragraphs with comments such as ‘good’, ‘needs improvement’ or ‘poor’.

You may find it useful to write down notes while listening to recordings of lessons. When you listen back to these recordings later, you’ll notice patterns in your behaviour and mistakes made.

By writing down these observations, you can start to plan future classes.

Use peer assessment to evaluate students’ progress. Ask one or two peers to assess each student’s understanding of course content.

Peer assessments can be particularly valuable for assessing students who struggle to complete assignments independently.

Use self-assessment to identify areas where students require extra support. Self-assessments can include quizzes, questionnaires, reflection exercises and portfolios.

They can be completed before or after a unit of study.

Provide written feedback to students. Provide detailed explanations of any problems identified using marking schemes or rubrics.

How important is giving feedback to your students?

Feedback process are very important part of teaching. It helps teacher to improve his/her skills and also help students to understand how he/she teach him/herself.

In order to get better results we need to know our strengths and weaknesses. We have to analyse ourselves and then try to change those things which we don’t want to do.

So if you want to become an excellent teacher, firstly you need to analyze yourself and then try to correct those things which you don’t want to do.

Here are some of the most common methods used to provide feedback:

• Comprehensive feedback

Comprehensive feedback are given when teachers observe what is happening in classroom. This type of feedback includes both verbal and nonverbal communication.

Teachers should pay attention to everything that happens in the classroom including body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, eye contact, gestures, etc.

When providing comprehensive feedback, teachers must consider the following factors:

1. The context of the situation
2. The relationship between the parties involved
3. What has happened previously
4. Who else was present at the time

Teachers should not make assumptions about learners’ knowledge and abilities based solely on their appearance. Instead, they should ask questions to clarify misunderstandings.

• Constructive feedback

Constructive feedback are provided when teachers observe learner’s work. They are usually focused on specific parts of the task and aim to encourage learning through constructive criticism.

This kind of feedback focuses on the quality of the product produced by the learner. Teachers will often comment on errors found within the text, but they won’t necessarily point out grammatical errors unless they’re obvious.

• Empowering feedback

Empowering feedback is a form of positive reinforcement. The purpose of this approach is to motivate learners so that they feel more confident with new tasks.

It involves praising learners for good performance as well as identifying ways in which they could improve. For example, “I noticed that you were able to solve problem X without having to look up the answer.”

“Great job! You really showed initiative!”

If you use empowering feedback, remember to praise all aspects of the assignment rather than just focusing on the final result.

• Giving negative feedback

Negative feedback is useful because it allows us to learn from mistakes. However, there are times when we might need to deliver negative feedback. Here are three situations when delivering negative feedback is appropriate:

1. To prevent future behaviour.
2. To avoid causing harm.
3. To address inappropriate behaviour.
4. There are two types of negative feedback: corrective and evaluative. Corrective feedback provides information about why something went wrong or needs improvement.
5. Evaluative feedback tells people whether they did a particular thing correctly or incorrectly. Corrective feedback can be delivered verbally or written down. If you choose to write down corrective feedback, ensure that you include examples of previous similar behaviours.
6. Incorrective feedback may take different forms depending on the nature of the error committed. It may involve giving advice such as “You forgot to add an apostrophe here” or “Your spelling mistake made me confused.”

Conclusion 

Giving feedback in proper way is very important part of teaching process. We have discussed how to provide feedback effectively.