Teacher Education
Identifying and encouraging student teachers through formative feedback is the best way to prepare them to meet the demands of their careers and the future of education.
So, here are three research-backed tips for improving feedback to student teachers.
Making your feedback visual will help your students really understand how to improve.
In their analysis of using visual performance feedback to increase the frequency of positive feedback given by teachers, Chris Sweigart, Timothy Landrum, and Robert Pennington (2015) found that positive feedback given by study participants only increased after receiving a graph that depicted how often they gave positive feedback the day before.
Graphs, charts, and diagrams can help your student teachers visualize their current behaviors and make plans to improve.
Using video to give student teachers feedback is a must.
Like visual performance feedback, video helps students visualize their actual behavior. But in video, student teachers see it all in action.
In their piece, “Record, Replay, Reflect: Videotaped Lessons Accelerate Learning for Teachers and Coaches,” Jim Knight et al. (2012) give their four reasons for using video to help teachers improve.
Video is objective, influential, important, and easy.
And it works. Teachers who are video recorded improve. Erika Pinter et al. (2015), in their article, “Effects of a Video-Feedback Intervention on Teachers’ Use of Praise,” note that “participants…felt the video feedback intervention was effective in increasing awareness of their own behavior” (465).
Identifying and encouraging student teachers through formative feedback is the best way to prepare them.
When giving feedback to student teachers, research shows that timing matters a lot. Mary Scheeler et al. indicate that “the only attribute that clearly demonstrates efficacy as a characteristic of effective feedback is immediacy. Thus, it seems obvious that supervisors should seek ways to provide feedback as close to the occurrence of teaching behavior as possible” (404).
By providing student teachers feedback as quickly as possible, you give them a chance to change quicker.
Making feedback visual, using video for feedback, keeping feedback immediate aren’t the only ways to improve feedback to your student teachers.
One of the best ways to help your student teachers is giving them feedback on giving feedback.
Here’s why it matters. In “Improving Teacher Feedback During Active Learning: Effects of a Professional Development Program,” Linda Van den Bergh et al. (2014) write, “Since feedback can be a very powerful tool for enhancing student learning, it is important that teachers are able to give their students qualitatively good feedback” (774).
Here’s one more from Sweigart et al.: “In a meta-analysis of 196 studies of feedback, Hattie and Timperley (2007) found feedback to be one of the most powerful practices teachers have available to maximize student achievement” (777).
So how do you help your student teachers improve their feedback?
Van den Bergh et al. write, “When teachers want to improve their feedback behavior, it is important that they set clear learning goals, communicate these goals to their students, and provide their students with feedback that explicitly relates their performance or understanding to these goals” (777).
Set goals, communicate goals, and relate to goals: the magic formula for feedback in the classroom.
Through visual aids, video, immediate feedback, and feedback training, you can help your student teachers better prepare for their future classrooms and students.
(And sometimes there’s a tool that will help you do all that. I have found that GoReact helps me give my students the feedback they need to learn and meet performance standards.)
