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How thinking about DIRT screwed up my feedback


“Pupils are responding to teacher feedback to improve their work with evidence of pupil progress.” I was the stereotypical new teacher spending evenings marking stacks of books and class time was then spent rewriting answers in a different coloured pen. These comments made it seem worthwhile though, pupils were improving thanks to my marking and DIRT.

There was only one problem. Pupils were not getting any better.


Economist Charles Godhart created Godhart’s law: ‘when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure’ and this was my issue with DIRT. It seems entirely sensible. Pupils will ignore feedback unless they actively act on it and so time to ‘reflect’ on feedback will help and I am not saying DIRT has no place in marking policies.

Yet when it becomes a target with evidence needed of feedback, I found I was focussing on how to show pupils were responding to feedback to an external observer rather than what made pupils improve.

Mark Enser talks a lot about the idea of teaching like nobody is watching, focussing on what others expect rather than what benefits our pupils and it helped me realise the 3 ways I was screwing up feedback.

1. Feedback was given too late 

I see most of my classes twice a week so typically pupils would write an essay on a topic and then the next week I would have marked it and given feedback. One of the earliest examples was when I noticed pupils were getting confused between a movement along and a shift in a demand curve and were using the terms interchangeably.

The problem was that by this point they had completed enough practice on this before errors had been corrected. Paul Kirschner and Carl Hendrick talk about practice not making perfect but making permanent and this is what was happening, the errors were becoming embedded. Rosenshine explains the importance of ensuring a high success rate before practice to avoid this problem.

Now what I would do is ensure these misconceptions have been identified and corrected immediately. This is done through questioning and utilising all class responses (what Doug Lemov refers to as ‘show me.’) By giving feedback and responding to errors before practice, pupils can complete practice with misconceptions tackled at source.

None of this appears in their books and there is no DIRT, but it has made my feedback infinitely more effective and led to much faster pupil’s progress.

2. Feedback is a poor way of improving knowledge

I was sat on a Saturday constantly writing the same comment again and again ‘explain the impact of monopoly power on consumer surplus.’ Then the next lesson pupils rewrote their paragraph with this helpful nugget of information to ‘explain the impact of your points.’

The problem was that they did not know the impact a monopoly has on consumer surplus and so being told to explain it wasn’t helpful and their redrafts weren’t much better.

A lot of errors I spot are down to a lack of knowledge. This is partly ameliorated by point 1 but there will always be some misconceptions. My favourite feedback I gave was after reviewing pupils’ answers on the impact of an indirect tax and discovering they did not fully understand why it was less effective for inelastic goods.

Kirschner and Hendrick talk about feedback being ineffective to teach knowledge gaps as what is needed is instruction. I retaught this material, checked for understanding extensively and a few weeks later we did a retrieval quiz on the topic. There was no need to redraft the essay as I was trying to ‘improve the pupil, not the work’ and essays in the future were improved due to a stronger knowledge of the topic.

There was nothing in their books to indicate DIRT but it was the best and simplest feedback I’ve ever given.

3. Focussing feedback on pupils and not on me

A common comment I would write is ‘you have not used the extract enough’ when marking pupils’ essays. The reason they were not was that I had not modelled it carefully enough, so they didn’t really understand how.

Dylan Wiliam speaks about AfL as ‘responsive teaching’ and part of that for me is adapting teaching practice rather than pupils necessarily improving their work. Initially I would ask pupils to redraft but use the extract more but as Daisy Christodoulou points out in her book, this is like giving a comedian feedback to ‘be funnier.’ True, but not helpful.

What I then started to do was make sure I gave a lot of worked examples of what application to context looks like. After they had seen full examples this was faded with a partial worked example 
where pupils had to improve it to use the extract more before moving on to independent work.

I never bothered to redraft the original answer as the issue was not that answer but how to apply to context in the future. Feedback should be a medical and not a post-mortem. 

This also eventually leads to the point where pupils fully understand success criteria and lead to what Mark Enser speaks of as self-regulation, where thy can assess and improve their own work as they will need to do in their exams.

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