The right style of feedback sandwich

I have recently been reading a number of posts and articles about the importance of good quality feedback as part of the learning process. As a teacher of many years experience this seems almost too obvious to be worth writing about. However, I want to look at one of the most commonly stated views at the moment: feedback should be positive and needs to focus on what a student can do better.

I do not disagree with the importance of praise as a key thing to motivate everyone, students and teachers alike, but there are many in the profession who have taken this to an extreme. A quite mediocre attempt at an assignment is showered with glowing comments which make it look like a contender for a literary prize. The feedback sandwich of congratulate - comment - congratulate has such thick slices of the congratulate bread that the all important comment filling is lost.

I wouldn’t want to eat a sandwich like this for my lunch and I don’t think it is that good for a student to have to consume this lesson after lesson. In teachers attempts to appear positive they are not really fulfilling their key role of helping students to improve.

The emphasis on praise has been such a feature of my whole career that it is hard to imagine what it was like in my own school days in the 1960s and 1970s where my teachers were quite ready to tell me that a piece of work wasn’t really good enough. This didn’t damage my self-esteem because by telling me this there was also an unspoken assurance that my teachers actually believed that I was capable of doing better. We all know that the best way of raising standards in education is to raise expectations.

My teachers were also showing that they believed that it was also perfectly normal to “fail”. This is something that, for a large proportion of the teaching profession, that is unthinkable. The main casualty in all this is resilience. Pupils, and their parents, look for every excuse when something goes wrong. It is never the responsibility of the pupil!

What I try to create with my classes is a climate where it is perfectly acceptable to find something difficult and a belief that, no matter how good a piece of work is, it can be better. I want my pupils to be comfortable with the fact that they have areas of weakness and to have a deep belief that they can get better. If I gloss over these weaknesses and concentrate surrounding the meat of my feedback with thick slices of congratulatory bread I am giving a message that there is a real problem with getting something wrong. 

Pupils need a good quality feedback sandwich with much greater emphasis on the meat in the middle than the air-filled bread of meaningless praise surrounding it!