A Chemical Orthodoxy

I go to a student who had got the definition wrong. I ask them if they had got it right or wrong, and they tell me they got it right. I go to another student a bit later and ask them to define diffusion for me, and they give me a bad definition.

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Ms F’s students are doing some stencil work. She pauses them and uses her visualiser to display one student’s work. She leads a class discussion looking at the characteristics of a good composition, especially regarding the balance of how students have used different types of shape rather than repeating patterns. I go to a number of students and first ask them if they were paying attention during the review session. I then ask them what they are planning on doing differently to their composition following the review. They tell me things like “make it neater” or “make sure the lines are accurate” or “more patterny [sic].”

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Dr Q is asking her students to translate sentences into French that include an infinitive onto their mini-whiteboards. A number of them get the order of the sentence wrong. He brings two boards to the front and shows them what he means, and then gives another example. Though the number of students who get it wrong decreases, there is still a large chunk of them who make the same error as before.

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When it comes to feedback, what we want is broadly:

1. Students produce some piece of work
2. Teacher notices something
3. Teacher gives feedback
4. Students’ understanding increases
5. Students produce a better piece of work

Clearly, in these cases something has gone wrong. Steps 1, 2 and 3 are all carried out for sure, and we also know that 5 hasn’t happened. We infer from the lack of 5 that 4 hasn’t happened either (you can’t directly tell anything about understanding, it’s invisible).

It’s a pretty common scenario, and these particular cases are doubly frustrating in that between them the teachers have done a lot of things right:

• They’ve been using mini-whiteboards
• They’ve been alert to errors on boards or in student work
• They’ve given clear and precise feedback
• They’ve brought boards to the front (Show Call)

Often, sadly, a lot of these simple strategies aren’t in play, and teachers aren’t properly checking for understanding or feeding back. But if the teachers are doing such a good job, why isn’t it working? Why isn’t students’ work improving? And why do students who got stuff wrong think that they got it right? Given the fact that the feedback was delivered and that it was appropriate and sensible, why hasn’t it worked?

Our central problem here is defined as “feedback has been delivered but nothing has changed.” I think there are three “points of failure” here – flaws in the setup that lead to some sort of break between “the thing I did” and “the outcome I wanted.” Let’s examine them:

Point of Failure 1: they aren’t listening

As I’ve written before, I often sit in lessons where it’s clear that the teacher is saying things that are good and meaningful and useful, but students aren’t listening. That could be during an explanation, when giving instructions, issuing feedback – whatever. The commonality is that students aren’t listening. This is definitely worthy of note, but it wasn’t really an issue in our feedback cases above and I’ve written about it before so click here for more on that.

Point of Failure 2: the work is unavailable

A very common issue is teachers giving feedback on work that isn’t in front of the students. This happens most often with mini-whiteboards, where students rub off their answers. It’s significantly harder for students to be able to tell if their work was right or wrong if it’s been rubbed off (especially if it’s longer than a word or so). It sounds obvious, yet here we are, and it’s something that definitely happens in my lessons as well – boards go up, I have a quick look, I ask the boards to go down and start talking about them, and students start rubbing their answers off.

A similar, and perhaps even more common, occurrence is where the verbal questioning is pushed verbally so far around the room that students lose the thread. Teacher asks for a student response to a question, then asks somebody else what they think about it, then somebody else and so on, and the students just can’t follow what’s going on (you can tell this is happening if you get Unexpected Answers). We’re asking quite a lot of the students – to listen to the teacher, hold what their friends are saying in their heads, relate what the teacher has said to what their friends just said, and then relate all that back to what’s in front of them. It means that information just vanishes from their heads, in the same way that work can vanish from a mini-whiteboard.

Some action steps to rectify Point of Failure 2 might be:

Increase the ability of students to follow review of MWB answers by saying “do not rub your boards off, put them down”

Increase the ability of students to follow review of longer student answers by writing them on the board or putting them under a visualiser

(for more on the construction of these action steps see here)

Point of failure 3: it’s not about me

This is my favourite one, because it relates to why feedback doesn’t work even if everything is available and even if students are listening. I have a long theory about the cognitive mechanism here, but without beating around the bush I think what happens is that students see or hear the feedback, understand it, nod their heads and go “yup that makes sense” and then completely fail to relate what they’ve heard to their work. Nothing about the feedback itself means it has to be applied to anything, a student can happily sit and listen to a teacher defining diffusion or listing the characteristics of a good stencil without actually applying it to anything. So yes, they “get it” in a general sense but no, they don’t then make the attempt to see how it relates to their work in particular.

Of course, our job is to make sure they do get the relationship teacher feedback → my work, and I’ve been trying a simple strategy that I call the “Tick Trick.” We’ll implement it in one of our old scenarios, with additions in bold:

Mr A is teaching his class about diffusion. Following the teaching, he asks them to define the term on their mini-whiteboards. He notices that a lot of them get it wrong, and says “ok do not rub off your boards, please put them down.” He writes up on the board that the correct answer consists of three parts:

• Diffusion is the spreading out of particles

“If you have that bit on your answer, give it a tick on your board.“

• [writes] From a region of high concentration

“If you have that bit on your answer, give it a tick on your board”.

• [writes] To a region of low concentration

“If you have that bit on your answer, give it a tick on your board…great…now hold up your boards for me to see please”

Bouncing the feedback like this back to students’ work forces them to engage and relate the feedback to what they have written. Not only that, but it gives you a second check for understanding – if a student has ticked something that’s obviously wrong or put a cross on something that’s right, you know that there was a problem either with your explanation or them paying attention.

I’ve been using the Tick Trick loads with my classes recently, here are some examples of questions they had done on MWBs and we then reviewed on my board:

I’ve just snipped these from my notebook so they aren’t the neatest things in the world, but I’m hoping you can see the thinking and reverse engineer.

When it comes Ms F’s art lesson above, she can’t really do the Tick Trick, but imagine if she’d said:

ok guys, I’d like you now to write on a mini-whiteboard one thing from the feedback that you are going to use to improve your stencil…

This again would force the students to engage with the feedback, and would give Ms F another check for understanding. Magic. Sometimes, students might need a heads up (listen carefully to the feedback, because after it I am going to ask you how it applies to your work…) but with a bit of practice and routine you should be able to get there.

As with most of the other strategies I like to recommend, it also doesn’t require much extra work, you don’t need to plan it out or prepare any resources or whatever, it’s just a slight shift to the way you deliver feedback in the moment.

As such, we have two final Action Step options:

During review, ensure students relate feedback to their work by using the Tick Trick

During review, ensure students relate feedback to their work by

• Telling them that you are going to ask them how the feedback relates to their work
• Having them write on a board what changes they are going to make to their work based on the feedback

I’ve been trying these routes with my classes and have had good results so far. I’d be very interested to hear what you make of them, and if you have any variations that you think would work – do share!

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I hope you enjoyed the blog. There is lots of mini-whiteboard talk here, and if you are interested I am going to be doing a webinar on mini-whiteboards at some point, see here for more information.