John Hattie’s research states clearly that giving students feedback is one of the most effective ways to help students progress.

Typically in a government school, students receive no feedback about their learning, nor any advice about how to improve.

So following our 1st term exams, we did a short training session on what makes good feedback. I shared three simple rules:

• be quick (give feedback as soon as possible)
• be positive
• be specific

I asked teachers to write their specific feedback on students’ exam papers, and it’s been good to see some teachers doing this with the exams…

but also continuing to do this in their day-to-day teaching. Here’s an example from one of our excellent English teachers:

The video above shows how I gave my English students feedback on their exams, with the help of… my students! Password: janauddhar

We still have a long way to go though. A week after the training, some teachers were still writing this kind of general and unhelpful feedback.