Queenslander!
Don‘t you feel proud to be a Queenslander? After great wins by the Brisbane Lions, Queensland Reds, a fantastic State of Origin game where the Maroons continued their winning streak against the NSW Blues and the win by the Queensland Firebirds in the ANZ Netball Final Championship game after an unbeaten record of wins during the season, state pride is at an all time high. Nothing builds state pride more than winning at the games we love against our arch rivals south of the border.
Building a championship team or group – whether a sporting team, a musical band, or choir - takes time, effort, deliberate practice, perseverance, commitment and belief in yourself and your team mates. While we celebrate the great Queensland victories and marvel at their achievements, it’s worth keeping in mind that every single person started somewhere many years ago with limited skills, experience and understanding of how best to improve. To get to the top or to excel in our chosen field requires much more than talent and sometimes we can begin with no talent at all or limited talent and still succeed. How can that be, you may be thinking?
In a sporting environment or a musical group we often need a good coach or a good instructor to help us develop our skills to realise our potential. This is true in many aspects of life – consider some of the favourite reality shows – Masterchef or Biggest Loser. How do the contestants improve? They receive specific feedback on what they are doing well and not only what they are not doing well, but more importantly, what they need to do to improve on those things that they are not doing so well. It’s this constructive feedback and practice that allows contestants, sportspeople and musicians to improve far beyond what they may have been able to achieve if it were not for this constructive feedback and advice.
Why are Queensland coaches like Wayne Bennett or Mal Meninga so sought after in Rugby League ? It’s because they have a demonstrated record of success in bringing players together and training them into a championship team. It is rare for anyone to achieve to high levels without good coaching and mentoring. Whether it’s sport, music, acting, singing, career, business or even school achievement, very few excel without constructive feedback from good coaches or mentors.
In the school environment, feedback is every bit as important as application to class work and study and some researchers would argue that it’s even more important. In his groundbreaking book Visible Learning, researcher and Professor of Education at the University of Auckland, John Hattie, found that after looking at all the possible influences on achievement, it became clear to him that feedback was among the most powerful influences on student achievement.
Hattie has made some important observations about the best kind of feedback to students and some of these observations may surprise you. Hattie explains feedback in this way:
Feedback is information provided by an agent (e.g., teacher, peer, book, parent or one’s own experience) about aspects of one’s performance or understanding. For example a teacher or parent can provide corrective information, a peer can provide an alternative strategy, a book can provide information to clarify ideas, a parent can provide encouragement, and a learner can look up the answer to evaluate the correctness of a response. Feedback is a “consequence” of performance.
Hattie and his researchers found that some types of feedback are more powerful than others in raising student achievement. The most powerful forms of feedback provide cues or reinforcement to the learner in the form of video, audio or computer assisted instruction feedback or relate feedback to learning goals. The key to the success of this kind of feedback is that it is received and acted upon by students.
Despite common perceptions, the least effective forms of feedback for enhancing students’ achievement are praise, punishment and extrinsic rewards. Tangible rewards like stickers, awards and so on have little merit in providing relevant task information and have little impact on improving achievement unless they are accompanied with specific feedback. Tangible rewards actually undermine people taking responsibility for motivating or regulating themselves, according to researchers like Deci, (1999) and Ryan (1985). Hard as this might be to believe and accept, the bottom line is that extrinsic rewards can actually have a negative impact on student engagement according to all of the research conducted with thousands of students, teachers and schools.
So what is the right form of feedback to give? According to Hattie, feedback is more effective when it provides information on correct rather than incorrect responses and when it builds on changes from previous tests. The main purpose of feedback is to reduce discrepancies between current understandings and performance and a learning intention or goal. This kind of feedback can be used in a range of teaching and coaching situations.
The major feedback questions to ask, which focus students most, are:
• “Where am I going?” (learning intentions, goals, success criteria)
• “How am I going?” (self assessment and self-evaluation)
• “Where to next?” (progression and new goals)
These questions work best when both the student and teacher (or parent) seek answers to each of these questions. Closing the gap between where the student is and where they are aiming to be, leads to the power of feedback. The art of course is to give students the right form of feedback at, or just above, the level where the students is working.
There is one exception, and that’s in terms of praise, because praise is rarely directed at the three feedback questions and therefore is rarely effective in improving student performance. What is most important is to have a classroom environment that is engaging and challenging, fosters peer and self-assessment, and allows students to learn from mistakes. The fact is that students need to make mistakes to learn. As Tyron Edwards once said:
Some of the best lessons we ever learn,
We learn from our mistakes and failures.
The error of the past is the success
And wisdom of the future.
Karon Graham
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