How I provide instructor-driven corrective feedback

When I think about how I provide instructor-driven corrective feedback to my students, I can count five major steps in my feedback process. Two of these steps happen outside the face-to-face meeting time and the other three happen in-class during live, face-to-face dialog.

Step 1: Students do their own planning and action before they meet with me. During this time, students spend as much time as they are able and willing to create evidence of their learning process. I ask students to bring this work with them so we have something to talk about.

Step 2: Students present their work, ideas, questions, and comments to me and their learning group. During this time, I listen very carefully with my eyes, ears, and body. I really pay attention to what I observe while they are speaking. I ask many follow up questions to get clarity about what I’m seeing, their life circumstances, and what types of thinking and experiences led the student to produce the work I’m looking at.

Step 3: I give detailed feedback while thinking about my various models for deep learning including my model for deep learning, my model for the 5 stages of mastery, and my model for a learning needs hierarchy (I have incorporated this model into my five learning objectives). To guide my feedback, I also rely on my mental models from each of the books I highlight in the resource below:

List of Final Deliverables for Your Learning Portfolio (Draft 1)

Step 4: At the end of our feedback sessions, I ask students to re-cap our conversation using the following questions:

-What did you hear me say?
-What comes up for you?
-What next steps do you want to commit to?

During this time, I ask that student’s learning partner(s) to help by taking notes on our conversation and capturing the action items that student has agreed to take. I try to get each student to commit to at least 1 – 3 changes they want to make to their learning processes.

Step 5: After our meeting ends, I expect students to reflect on our session and make real changes to their process on future work based on our conversation. In fact, in our subsequent meetings, I ask students to remind me what they were working to improve and then show me how they improved their work based on our feedback.