Feed-Up, Feedback, and Feed-Forward (#ascdfc)

Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey

www.fisherandfrey.com

Notes from ASCD Fall 2010 Conference

What formative assessment looks like beyond "formative assessment in a box."

Quality instruction is important but it's not enough if the teacher never knows where her students are during the course of instruction.

Teachers need to...

• Establish learning goals
• Check for understanding
• Provide feedback
• Align future instruction with student performance

Feed up:  Where am I going? This establishes purpose

Check for understanding: daily monitoring of learning

"There are teachers who do not want to check for understanding because they taught it the only way they know how."

Feed back:  providing students with information about their success and needs. If teacher and learner don't share the same definition of quality, feedback is useless. Feedback with no future direction leads to frustration, confusion, giving up

Feed forward: using student performance for "next steps" instruction and feeding this into an instructional model

Shared model for gradual release of responsibility: Gradually transferring responsibility for learning to the student.

Homework: Practice doesn't make perfect but it does make permanent!

Feed Up:  Why are we doing this anyway?

"If instruction doesn't have a purpose, student doesn't know what to pay attention to & teacher doesn't know what to assess."

Purpose always has a content component and a language component.

Check for understanding: How am I doing?

How not to check for understanding (how often do you do this?):

• Everybody got that?
• Any questions?
• Does that make sense?
• Ok?

Retellings:

• Oral to oral
• Oral to written
• Oral to video
• Reading to oral
• Reading to written
• Reading to video
• Viewing to oral
• Viewing to written
• Viewing to video

Use digital retelling such as "trailers" for books.

Questioning habits of teachers: 

• Dominated by initiate-response-evaluate cycles; no exploration beyond what the student is able to recall
• 85% of novice teachers' questions are recognition and recall (Tienken, Goldberg, & DiRocco, 2009)

6 types of formative assessment questioning:

• Elicitation - draws on information
• Elaboration - solicits reasoning
• Clarifying - extends thinking
• Inventive - stimulates imaginative thought
• Divergent - requires use of previously taught and new information
• Heuristic - engages in informal problem solving

Feed back: how am I doing?

Typically teachers are caught in a mismatch between feedback and core beliefs.

Making feedback useful:  Timely, specific, understandable, actionable

When to provide feedback:

• Feedback about the task
• Feedback about the processing of the task
• Feedback about self-regulation
• Feedback about the self as a person

Feedback must be structured for effectiveness: Improving student performance.

Feed forward: where to next?

• Error analysis
• Error coding

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