The consideration of Hattie’s discussion on feedback raises my awareness of some important gaps in the feedback I have been offering students. I teach across a wide range of disciplines in both applied and theoretical areas, so my feedback is necessarily diverse.
For example, in a course where I am preparing students to succeed in the office environment at the end of the year, my feedback is focused upon what will make them valued employees in the very near future. By contrast, when I am teaching writing courses that ultimately are aimed at on-the-job writing, but for students whose career paths require longer terms of training before working at a job, I need to couch my comments in a context that involves a much longer training path before the students are writing for an employer. Finally, when I am teaching critical thinking or ethics, my concerns pertaining to the writing of students is more the clarity (and charity!) of their thought, rather than the specific form of their written communication.
All of this tends toward a careful consideration of the goals inherent in the course being taught (as well as students’ compliance and interest in those goals). One of Hattie’s notions that caught my attention is that students may and should be involved in the process of goal-setting. I have tended to think of goal-setting as something done as a part of the process of getting a course approved at the university, and so, not open to negotiation on the part of the instance of a course being taught. Having generally understood the important of creating a class-collective (learning community or community-of-inquiry–COI) and welcoming processes of knowledge construction socially in the context of class sessions, I did not see how dis-empowering the notion of predefined goals were to an authentic learning community dynamic.
As a result, I can see that I need to have more careful discussion with students concerning the process of goal-setting as a prerequisite to engaging and providing feedback on students’ work during the course.
This is merely the first step to increase the quality of feedback I provide. I must also include the questions and the types of feedback Hattie considers in providing a more beneficial feedback process to students.