S6E6: Giving Meaningful Feedback

Teacher Training Manager Jane Kaskova shares her best practices for giving feedback to teenage or adult language students to power their learning and motivate them.

In this episode, Jane shares tips on:

• How to tailor feedback for lower-level versus higher-level students.

• What to prioritise when facilitating error correction in class.

• The different ways we can communicate feedback to our students.

• How we can organise our feedback to keep it balanced.

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To watch this episode with closed captions, click on the video below or scroll down to view the transcript.

Transcript

Laura: TESOL Pop Season six Episode six. Hello and welcome to TESOL Pop; the mini podcast for busy teachers. My name is Laura and joining me today to talk about providing meaningful feedback to learners is Jane Kaskova. Jane is a CELTA-certified ESL teacher and a teacher training manager at EF Teach Online. She's taught general English business, English and exam preparation courses for over 15 years.

As an educator, Jane believes in changing the world through the power of education, which led her to speak at this year's [2023] IATEFL conference in Harrogate. Jane, thank you so much for your time and welcome to the show.

Jane: Thank you so much for inviting me.

Laura: In today's episode, we're going to talk about the important role feedback plays in supporting learners, progress and motivation. In addition, Jane is going to share tips on how to prioritize feedback, tailor it to learners’ level as well as structure feedback so that it is balanced. If you want to learn more about the impact of good feedback on the learning process and the technology that we can use to support it, then go back and listen to Season five Episode five, on Using Technology to Give Great Feedback with Vibbl founder Nihad Ćehić.

Earlier this year, Jane, you did speak at the IATEFL conference in Harrogate, as I mentioned, about feedback and giving meaningful feedback to learners. Why is this such an important topic for you?

Jane: Feedback can be a powerful tool for learning and growth, but it can also be demotivating and discouraging if it's not delivered effectively to students. And by asking students how they feel about feedback, teachers can tailor their approach to meet the needs and preferences of their students. And this can lead to more effective feedback that is better received and more likely to result in positive learning outcomes for students.

Additionally, I guess asking for feedback can help build credibility and rapport between teachers and students, which again can lead to more positive and productive learning environment. That's why I chose this topic to talk about in Harrogate, as I wanted more teachers to be aware of this fantastic instrument of making students stronger and kind of supporting them on their way while studying the language.

Laura: That's wonderful. And I was wondering, has this been your experience with your learners? Because you've obviously taught for many years now in different contexts. Has feedback really influenced the outcome and the progress you've seen in your own students?

Jane: Absolutely, yeah. I feel like that if it's delivered effectively, you can track the student's progress and basically understand like how basically understand how it feels in the in the holding environment, both when it comes to general language classes and exemplification classes.

Laura: You've covered the importance of feedback and have on the learning progress and indeed your own learners. So what you've seen the outcome as a result of great feedback. One of the things that comes to mind when we think about feedback is tailoring it to learners level, particularly if you've got beginner learners that don't have a lot of language and are still building these foundations.

This is obviously the higher level learners. Do you have any tips on how we can tailor feedback to ensure that learners understand and benefit from the feedback we want to give them?

Jane: It's a very nice question, Laura. And I would say normally provide concise kind of short feedback to a lower-level student. All of our students do with them being overwhelmed and stressed. And however, when it comes to high-level students, they are kind of more likely to be prepared - they're ready to deep dive to extended and analytical type of feedback, like detailed type of feedback so they could tackle range and grammar and vocabulary and work on different areas of improvement.

And again, as I said, finally, they can handle it, I guess, and now their interest in point we need to consider is how to deliver a feedback post level of students and high level students in a report, in email or in person. And like we we need to decide because every student is different, their personality is different, and it's very take into account these things.

And if I know my student is shy and feels uncomfortable when we work on feedback together after the class or after their speech, I will talk about it in advance and offer to record my feedback on video or send it by a report. I mean, I send my report via email and this type of delayed feedback shows and allows them to take their own time and pace and work on it in a comfortable atmosphere and improve, make some improvements.

However, again, it's important to take into account another fact that different teachers, they're busy and their timetable is different and you need to be realistic about that. And if you have a big number of students who are a big group, you cannot provide any feedback to every single student. And in this case, a few. It's better to rely on strong students and ask them to support the lower students and encourage them to talk.

And again, they deliver feedback. In this case, I reduce my Teacher Talking Time and I engage all, all the students to work together. And if you have a 1 to 1 class, you probably have the widest set of options for delivering feedback. And again, however, when you have the group, you need to consider how much time can be given for feedback.

Laura: When we're in classes, there's often a lot of things that we could give feedback on, so we may notice errors in language or particular skills that could be improved soft skills as well. It can be quite overwhelming as teachers to kind of process all that and determine what to prioritize. What should we prioritize when we're giving feedback to our learners?

Do you have any tips on this?

Jane: I guess it's important to differentiate between sleep senderos and find the sweet point between constructive feedback and positive one. Learners make sleep when they already have the knowledge, but let concern and attention. It can also be because they're stressed or they feel anxiety or any other negative emotions. And anyways, it's kind of a mechanical type of feedback and I guess you need to have this proper feeling that you can correct on the spot in an encouraging way.

But again, I need to make sure that I don't want to interrupt the fluency. This it's all about boosting the way of their confidence in the way how they speak and in this way I can not always correct by, you know, using my words, I can show with my facial expressions, make it correct or not correct. Or for example, I can show that if the lexical item was used correctly or something like that.

But again, the disapproval gestures and thinking face might indicate that there is a slight, teeny tiny sleep over there and the student in this case can self-correct and if the learner corrects themselves, it means they recognize where they made a mistake and simply can reflect on it. However, our role is more formal, and when students have errors, it is because they lack the proper knowledge, in particular grammar area or vocabulary.

And again, in this case I do not correct every single error because it might be overwhelming for a student, even for high level students. So I try to prioritize feedbacks on errors and define errors, which would be the communication most. For example, if you recently had our classes focused on different grammar areas, in my feedback I would also focus on grammar errors rather than intonation and pronunciation for stronger students.

Again, if you wrote your in your relational vocabulary, then I can make my comments on range and lexical items and in most cases, even if you have a strong student, there is always room for improvement. You can always come up with a better word chunk, a collocation or expression of an advanced proficiency level. And finally, I would structure my feedback and help my students to polish necessary studying areas and along with bringing up something like that where they made some mistakes.

I would come up with some extra examples and extra activities for my students in this particular area to work on grammar or vocabulary so they could improve on their performance next time, for example. I always try to find the right balance to cover the most relevant areas of student'’ development and strengths, always balancing between constructive and positive feedback.

Laura: I love what you mentioned at the start as well, like students maybe making a slip or an error because they're tired or a bit stressed. So really kind of standing back and observing your students and then using that to inform how much constructive feedback you're going to give. This is obviously the positive feedback that you mentioned as well can be really influential in terms of keeping the student motivated.

If you notice, your students are having not a great day or particularly stressed about an exam, then you're probably going to swing more towards the encouragement and helping them acknowledge what they are good at and what their strengths are to build their confidence.

Jane: I can suggest a couple of methods when delivering feedback to my students. I use the sandwich method, which involves different layers. Then delivering feedback, and I always start with positive ones when providing positive feedback. Then you deliver another layer where the meat comes off constructive criticism and then you take turns. So it's kind of a sandwich. And however, when the meat comes, I try not to bring too much constructive feedback or negative feedback to my students because again, remember that some people are vegetarians.

They do not like too much meat. So be gentle with constructive feedback. And whenever I deliver my feedback, I try to avoid saying something like, 'You made a mistake here or there.' I try to say something like, ‘Let's see how we can make your idea better or your sentence better.’

And another technique - I use this method of Three Kicks and Kisses. One of the teachers, my colleagues, shared this method with me and I really like it. So it's more or less the same approach, a like sandwich approach when you deliver. But it starts like when you deliver with three positive comments and three areas of improvement. And I always try to bring this positive vibe to my students and say like, ‘Are you ready for Kicks and Kisses now?’ And they always laugh and have fun.

Laura: That's a lovely way of balancing the feedback. And I hadn't heard of these kicks and kisses until you actually described it to me why we were planning this episode. So I really love that idea.

Jane: Yeah, it's so funny. Rather than giving again vague comments such as ‘You need to improve your grammar,’ I try to be specific. Bring up specific examples from their speech, from what they mentioned, and providing multiple examples on different areas will allow students to reflect on the areas of development from different angles. And then when you take into account all these factors like prioritising feedback, different techniques on bringing it to the student in different ways, to bringing it to the student like personal way, like when you're finished your conversation, you try to deliver it - write to your student, or you bring it in a formal report. The way, how you deliver it, like you try to think about different factors, and then it really works. And you can really track your students’ progress as a teacher. And it works and it's great.

Laura: This is fantastic tips. Thank you so much, Jane, for sharing your tips on how to prioritise and how to structure feedback. So many ideas I can think about reflect on my own practice; I'm sure listeners are the same.

Jane: My pleasure. Thank you so much, Laura. It was a pleasure to talk about it with you.

Laura: Jane blogs regularly about this and other topics, so you can check out her LinkedIn to learn more about this. And as always, I've put a link to her LinkedIn in the show notes below.

If you have a question you'd like to answer or, like Jane, you have a topic to pitch for an episode, then you can contact us via Instagram, Facebook, or the website tesolpop.com

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