How can we enhance students’ public products using effective feedback strategies?
Launch PBL Series
EP1: How can we create an impactful PBL experience?
EP2:What is project-based learning?
EP3: What are the benefits of project-based learning?
EP4: How can we write a quality driving question for a PBL unit?
EP5: How can we foster academic risk-taking during PBL?
EP6: How can we assess students during project-based learning?
EP7: How can we use milestones to track students’ progress during PBL?
EP8: How can we choose an engaging project-based learning topic?
EP9: What is the teachers’ role during project-based learning?
EP10: How can we plan a project showcase without feeling overwhelmed?
EP11: How can we use effective feedback strategies to enhance students’ public products?
EP 12: How can teachers improve their PBL experience through reflection?
EP 13: How can we shift students from presentations to presentations of learning?
Feedback is an essential component of the formative assessment process and, when used effectively, can enhance students' learning and their public products.
Public products are the products students use to share the solution to their driving question. For example, a driving question could be, how can we convince our peers that monitoring and minimizing human impact on the environment is important?
Students could share what they learned using a variety of strategies such as writing and illustrating a comic book, filming a video, designing a print public service announcement, writing, and delivering a persuasive speech, producing a news segment, creating informational posters or infographics to post around their school, or conducting a social media awareness campaign.
During project-based learning, we often give formative assessments throughout the PBL unit. Formative assessments are frequently used throughout the learning process to check student progress, providing students opportunities to revise their work based on feedback.
Feedback can take many forms. It can be the audience's reaction to a product or the results of someone's performance on a test. Most importantly, feedback is information that will be used to improve a particular task.
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Why Feedback Can Be Scary for Students (and Teachers)
Typically, when I do any training, there's a feedback mechanism, and I'm so used to receiving feedback that it is no longer a scary thing. But that's not the case for everyone. Sometimes people struggle with receiving feedback because they feel that someone is talking negatively about their work. Instead, feedback should be viewed as a tool to help you enhance your work.
Often students (or teachers) who don't respond well to feedback do not receive it regularly. For me, feedback has become such a part of my daily life that I don't mind asking people, What could I have done better? What went well? What things could I improve? When you make feedback a regular process in your classroom, it will become less scary for students.
Another reason people might be afraid of feedback is that their feedback is not of good quality. Here are some common types of unhelpful feedback:
It’s not actionable— you don’t know what to do to fix a problem.
It’s not specific.
It’s not timely.
The tone of the feedback is judgmental or negative.
It focuses on what you are doing wrong but does not provide suggestions for improvement.
It feels like a personal attack on your character.
There is no feedback given to you at all.
The last type can be particularly unhelpful. Perhaps you’ve been in a situation where you didn't get feedback. Therefore, you thought you were doing a great job because you didn't hear anything otherwise. But when your evaluation came around, you were surprised to find out you had several things that you needed to improve on. Similarly, if the feedback comes too late, for example, only at the end of a unit, it will not be helpful to your students.
Characteristics of Effective and Ineffective Feedback
When done well, feedback should answer the following questions.
What skills do I seek to develop?
What's my progress towards my goal? OR How close am I to mastering a particular skill?
What's my next step?
If a student cannot answer those questions, they're probably receiving ineffective feedback.
Giving effective feedback is a skill teachers must learn. It takes a lot of time and practice to develop this skill, but it is essential because students struggle to improve their work without quality feedback. For example, if you give a test, assign a grade, and then give the test again, without telling students what they did incorrectly or how they can do better, what will happen? Most likely, the students will get the same or similar results on the next test.
Common mistakes teachers make when giving feedback include:
Telling students everything is great because you don’t want to hurt their feelings. If you do this, you don’t give students any room for improvement.
Focusing more on what's wrong without brainstorming ideas for improvement. If you only point out what is wrong and don’t give students suggestions for how to improve, students will become frustrated.
How to Give Effective Feedback
Provide feedback promptly. Don’t wait until the end of the unit to give feedback on something that was done at the beginning of the unit. At that point, students have lost the opportunity to make any changes.
Think about your project milestones, which you should develop as you plan your project-based unit. A milestone represents a significant event or stage in the learning process. There should be an initial milestone to prepare students for the unit and several intermediate milestones based on the expected duration of the unit. Finally, there should be a milestone for sharing public products.
When students design their first draft of their public product, determine when you will check in with students to provide support so that they can meet the deadline for sharing their public products.
Be specific with your comments. If you look at a student’s work and say, “That looks good,” you did not provide any insight on what students did well, nor did you offer advice on how they can enhance their work. If students hear that vague statement, they will probably say thanks and feel good initially, but they won’t be motivated to consider any changes.
Instead, say something like, “I see that you include five compelling ways that teenagers can reduce their impact on the environment. Explain why protecting the environment is important. Use your rubric for guidance.” It’s important to state where to find guidance so they can modify their work.
Align feedback to a skill. You can do this by using a project rubric that evaluates student performance based on a range of criteria or characteristics that student work should exhibit. To be effective, your rubric should describe specific quality levels for each criterion with descriptors for each rating and contain examples or concrete indicators for each level of performance. You can use these descriptors to guide student feedback. This feedback method encourages students to refer to the rubric as they progress during a PBL unit.
Create a culture of feedback in which students view constructive criticism as ordinary and necessary for growth. You want students to know that it's okay not to have all the answers and it's okay to be wrong. Sometimes students learn more from the experience of a project than the outcome. Whether you're teaching through PBL or not, you want to build a classroom culture that values suggestions for improvement. Over time, you will see that students will be equipped with a growth mindset and will seek out feedback.
However, you must also provide space for them to utilize the feedback. For example, I'm currently in the final phases of a doctoral program, writing my capstone project (or, as it's called at some universities, a dissertation). At this point, I've received multiple rounds of feedback, and I feel like I've written the same paper at least 100 times. Each time I'm required to change something before I resubmit it.
So, I'm now used to getting feedback on my writing, and I know that I'm expected to make some form of change based on the feedback. It doesn't mean that I have to take every suggestion that the professor makes, but I know if there's something that I should have thought about or done differently. Similarly, when you are giving feedback to students, make sure that they are required to review your feedback and respond to it with changes to their product.
Be positive. When giving feedback, monitor your tone and choice of words. However, please don't overdo it by being so positive that the message is lost. Ensure that your feedback inspires thought or curiosity. You want to encourage students to be active learners. Refrain from telling them exactly what to do, which takes away from student choice and voice and doesn't help them develop their decision-making skills. Instead, ask questions and share what you are wondering so that they can decide the next step they should take.
Ways To Provide Feedback
There are many ways you can provide feedback, either in a written or verbal format. When choosing your feedback method, the most important thing to consider is how it will equip students to tackle the next step of their project or improve their progress towards a skill. Of course, the method you choose will also depend on what is age-appropriate for your student
Offer Written Feedback
Make annotations on the project rubric. Note that this does not mean just circling a level and saying, "This is novice" or "This is advanced." It would be best to use the rubric's descriptors and criteria to give feedback on that particular level. For example, if you place something on one level, explain what prevented that student from moving to the next level by giving them direct feedback on the gaps that you saw within the levels.
As an instructional coach, I analyzed teachers by going into their classrooms and using a rubric to place them on a particular level, such as novice, proficient, or advanced. At the end of the second year of the program, we sent out a survey asking how we could improve, and teachers responded by saying that while they understood the rubrics and the grading, this feedback wasn’t helping them understand what to change.
Naturally, you would think that someone could look at the next level’s criteria and descriptions to determine what to do. Still, teachers expressed it wasn't as actionable as it seemed, so we started using the rubric to identify the teacher's level. We also gave actual feedback on what prevented them from moving to that next level, allowing them to make changes in their classroom.
Similarly, when you are giving feedback to students, make sure to provide feedback on how they can progress. Even though you may say to a student, you are a novice at this because you did these things well, you also need to explain what they can do to move to the next level.
Use comments on Google Docs (or whatever students are using to turn in work) to provide feedback. You can write a couple of sentences to share your feedback, and then students can resolve the comment after taking action. When they submit a new draft of their work, you can go back and see if they made any modifications.
Consider providing quick feedback using sticky notes. For example, you can use this method to respond to students’ drafts of their public product, whether it's a physical product or a digital product. Writing feedback on a sticky note and handing it to the student can be a way to make feedback seem less formal and easier for students to grasp.
Give Feedback Verbally
One way to provide verbal feedback is via teacher-led discussions (aka student-teacher conferences), where you have questions and discussion topics about the student's work. These discussions should be pre-planned to ensure that you provide quality feedback. Create your questions and your topics in advance so that you and the student can stay on task. This type of conference allows you to be direct with your feedback.
Another option is teacher-student check-ins which are student-led. The student should come to the meeting with an agenda for what they want to discuss, such as an aspect of the project that they're struggling with. You will need to prep students on how to lead this form of check-in. For example, you could provide conversation starter prompts, sentence stems, or question starters to help them begin the conversation. But still, be prepared to ask guiding or follow-up questions to ensure that the check-ins are productive and that you're moving to a place where you can provide quality feedback.
You can also give feedback during whole class or small group instruction. Maybe you notice that students are missing key concepts, or they're all struggling with the same content. You can use this time to respond to any challenges preventing students from making the academic growth necessary to keep students moving through the PBL unit. For example, maybe students are having difficulty connecting how a shift in climate impacts the Earth. As a result, they're unable to formulate ideas on how humans can minimize their impact on the environment. In that case, you might want to do small group discussions or a mini-lesson to address that academic content.
Finally, you can use video to respond to students’ work. You can give feedback on a student’s draft by creating a quick video using a tool such as Loom. I do this when I'm providing feedback on teachers’ project plans. It's easy for me to look at their project plan and turn on Loom to make a quick five-minute video to give feedback.
If you want to use this option, you can review the student's work in advance so that you are prepared to give feedback promptly when you hit record. You don't want to lose students' attention by rambling. It would help if you started with a quick intro, explain the students' successful actions and areas for growth, and then provide the next steps for the assignment, such as sharing your upcoming deadline or whatever would be helpful to take action.
Take Action:
Reflect on the following: How do you plan to utilize feedback to enhance students’ public products? At what stage of the project-based learning unit will students receive feedback on their public products?