{"id":1479,"date":"2022-11-17T16:16:10","date_gmt":"2022-11-17T16:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/learning-design\/?p=1479"},"modified":"2022-12-14T13:33:01","modified_gmt":"2022-12-14T13:33:01","slug":"its-ok-not-to-know-professor-john-hattie-and-the-power-of-feedback","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/learning-design\/?p=1479","title":{"rendered":"\u201cIt\u2019s OK not to know!\u201d: Professor John Hattie and the power of feedback"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hayley Johns ~ Learning Designer\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Feedback, according to Professor John Hattie, is \u2018one of the most powerful notions we have\u2019 in education – and also one of the most variable.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, I joined an instalment of Phil Anthony\u2019s award-winning Digitally Enhanced Education webinar series<\/a> to learn more about how institutions around the world are prioritising feedback as a key part of learning. Amid a wide variety of talks on assessment and feedback, a few really stood out. I\u2019m particularly excited to share with you some of the wisdom of Professor Hattie on the power of feedback as a process of constant learning, of asking questions, and of low stakes \u2018failure\u2019 in a supportive environment.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At its core is the concept of improvement. Improving can mean a variety of things; you might be asking students to stop something, start something, do something differently. Feedback too can come in all shapes and sizes: from a teacher, from self-reflection, from another student in a peer feedback activity, or \u2013 increasingly \u2013 from a technology.<\/p>\n

Professor Hattie is keen to impress upon us that research suggests that giving feedback in a \u2018nice\u2019, encouraging way isn\u2019t always effective.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s our message? <\/strong><\/h5>\n

As educators, we like to think of ourselves as warm, encouraging people but the problem of effusive praise is that it can dilute the feedback we\u2019re trying to give. What message are we trying to get to the student? Not only how they did, but what they can do next to improve. Too much praise here can affect the message that our students hear, understand, and ultimately action. We\u2019re looking for the perfect trio: praise, critique, and advice.<\/p>\n

As human beings, we can sometimes look for evidence that we\u2019ve succeeded and disregard the rest \u2013 a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. Sometimes we\u2019re terrified to tell people we don\u2019t know! However, Hattie argues, our job as learners can (and should) be to look for evidence that we did not succeed, because that\u2019s how we improve. It\u2019s OK not to know! It\u2019s a phrase that so many of us have heard, and it\u2019s one that educators are fond of using to try and reassure students. But we should also be doing our best to internalise the message ourselves. Feedback loves errors. This kind of environment, where students and teachers alike can make mistakes in safety, can be so helpful, creating a climate which is rich both in feedback and students\u2019 questions. (Hattie quotes an astonishing figure: teachers ask around 150 questions a day which require roughly three-word answers. A class \u2013 a class, not a student \u2013 asks 2-3 questions a day!)<\/p>\n

How do we go about constructing this sort of classroom, whether virtual or physical, to maximise feedback opportunities? Because, as Hattie kindly notes, educators are nice people, we like to give students things they don\u2019t struggle with \u2013 things that they know and can get right, with minimal struggle. But that doesn\u2019t serve them at all. Curiosity about what you don\u2019t know is key. Often, we can grow out of this as we get older but, to improve, it\u2019s really important that we retain our roles as learners \u2013 that we take on difficult tasks, and we fail, and that\u2019s OK. The \u2018feedback cauldron\u2019 climate in our classrooms makes all the difference.<\/p>\n

Because of the inequity in classroom dialogue, Hattie is very much an advocate of a \u2018teach less, learn more\u2019 philosophy. The more we talk about teaching, the more we\u2019re talking about ourselves as educators and what we\u2019re doing; the more we talk about learning, the more we\u2019re talking about the students. It\u2019s about them, not us; it\u2019s their education, after all.<\/p>\n

Evaluative thinking<\/strong><\/h5>\n

The key issue is how we think about what we do, using a notion of evaluative thinking, constantly looking for impact; it\u2019s a kind of feedback in itself, that metacognition of reflecting on what we do and how. Incidentally, Hattie\u2019s biggest tip is to pause and ask your students \u2018how am I doing?\u2019 Seeking the feedback from them will help you to make decisions. Happily, this is a key focus for us in Learning Design too, as evidenced by our Curriculum Design Student Panel (CDSP)<\/a> and Real-Time Student Feedback (RTSF)<\/a> initiatives. The CDSP gives module teams an opportunity to find out students\u2019 opinions on their activities, as a dedicated, representative panel road-tests parts of a module in production and provides their feedback on it. RTSF, meanwhile, is used in presentation, to gather students\u2019 opinions and implement measures to assist them during the current academic year, for maximum impact.<\/p>\n

Finally, Hattie tackles the question on everyone\u2019s mind in the wake of the disruption wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic: is there a difference in how we should give face-to-face feedback compared to online?<\/p>\n

Encouraging feedback via technology<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Hattie has observed interesting action by students using social media; while students may avoid seeking help or admitting misunderstanding in a \u2018live\u2019 classroom setting, in his experience, students are more likely to ask questions online, to both their fellow students and their teachers. This is, in his view, the biggest power of technology which is currently untapped. Again, this has positive implications for our own work here in Learning Design on aspects such as VLE tools and activity types.<\/p>\n

The OU\u2019s forum platform is a powerful asset here; students can ask questions and take part in discussions with both their peers and their tutors, encouraging communication and forging relationships in a virtual learning context. Likewise, technology can lend itself to anonymous feedback, enabling students to freely share their thoughts or feelings without worry of being identified; this might be useful in a tutorial context, where a tutor can use anonymous polling to gauge a group\u2019s understanding without fear of causing individual students embarrassment, or in RTSF<\/a>, where module teams might gather anonymous students\u2019 assessments of their own wellbeing, so that they can work out how best to support a cohort.<\/p>\n

The last few years, and in particular the COVID-19 pandemic, fundamentally changed dynamics in classrooms. Shifting to this virtual way of working, rather than standing at the front of a physical classroom, teachers couldn\u2019t ask those 150 questions requiring three-word answers \u2013 they had to learn a new way of working, to teach students to truly be learners and to work with each other. The biggest travesty, he thinks, is perhaps that there\u2019s been such a rush back to the old normal, and that we don\u2019t seem to be learning much from our pandemic experiences. They turned our teaching and working practices on their head, requiring the way in which our students experience education to be completely rebuilt in a short space of time. Rather than turning back to the way things were, Hattie frames this as an opportunity for education to move forwards. Similarly, the recent \u2018Blended learning review\u2019 from the Office for Students (OfS)<\/a> recommends that learning design should support students to access feedback in interactive and collaborative ways, both from module teams and their peers, and that this should be a real focus for staff development.<\/p>\n

With this in mind, how can we as learning designers (or other education professionals) support each other to create these opportunities for our students?<\/p>\n

\n
Related links<\/h5>\n

You can watch Professor John Hattie in conversation with Phil Anthony here: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=HbHt1OecP0U<\/a><\/p>\n

The full Digitally Enhanced Assessment and Feedback playlist is here: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLAbF8wnSF-e_Bxkcf6G9hTUG-XDnq-74d<\/a><\/p>\n

Details of future Digitally Enhanced Education webinars can be found here: https:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/education\/elearning\/news-and-events#events<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hayley Johns ~ Learning Designer\u00a0   Feedback, according to Professor John Hattie, is \u2018one of the most powerful notions we have\u2019 in education – and also one of the most variable. Earlier this year, I joined an instalment of Phil Anthony\u2019s award-winning Digitally Enhanced Education webinar series to learn more about how institutions around the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":1487,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86,101,1,35,6,84],"tags":[108,89,106,107,105,104,103,102],"class_list":["post-1479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ed-tech","category-feedback","category-learning-design","category-ld-under-the-hood","category-student-centred-learning","category-technology-enhanced-learning","tag-blended-learning","tag-ed-tech","tag-evaluative-thinking","tag-learning-technology","tag-online-learning","tag-professor-john-hattie","tag-student-centered-learning","tag-student-feedback"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/learning-design\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/learning-design\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/learning-design\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/learning-design\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/learning-design\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1479"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/learning-design\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1505,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/learning-design\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1479\/revisions\/1505"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/learning-design\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/learning-design\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/learning-design\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/learning-design\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}