The Infused Classroom Blog
How To Give Effective Feedback to Students: Using Microsoft Teams
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Have you ever given feedback that looked a little something like this: “Good job” or “This is a bit vague” or "Add more details"?
Luckily, several features of Microsoft Teams make purposeful feedback easy to deliver, but first we must take a look at what effective feedback is and how we can craft it to really help students grow.
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From the students perspective...
Recently, I helped a student with a project she was asked to do around political campaigns. The idea was to create a political campaign for a Greek god or goddess based on what the 12 year-old student knew about US political campaigns.
At first, I thought this was a great idea. But then, I realized it was missing some key components.
- It was missing an articulated learning target.
- It was devoid of any scaffolding around political campaigns (which this 12 year old had limited knowledge about).
- There were no success criteria of any kind - with any guidance on how the student could effectively show she had met those goals.
What I did know from the directions sheet was that she was to create a campaign poster for this Greek goddess.
When the student turned in the final poster, the feedback that came back was confusing. The teachers' comments were based around the graphics and use of words. It had nothing to do with actually understanding political campaigns or the characteristics of her chosen Greek goddess. This is not the first time I have seen this kind of confusing feedback, and it made me think its time for a feedback post - because learning remotely makes this even more important..
In my opinion, the feedback came out of left field. It did not help the student progress around what I had to assume was the learning target. Feedback should help students meet a well defined learning goal. We should provide chunking or scaffolding toward that goal and a rubric or menu of some kind with success criteria (A personal favorite is the single-point rubric. Check it out in this post on the Cult of Pedagogy blog.)
More on this experience below...
A Quick Look at Giving Effective Feedback to Students
In an Educational Leadership article, Seven Keys to Effective Feedback, Grant Wiggins reinforces the crucial importance of how to give effective feedback to students within our learning cycle. He writes, “Decades of education research support the idea that by teaching less and providing more feedback, we can produce greater learning (see Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Hattie, 2008; Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001).”
Effective feedback requires a learning target that is clearly articulated. Feedback should reference this goal with actionable steps.
In the political campaign example, some of the feedback on the poster simply said you need more words here and make them larger. (If she is making them larger, then that is a design and graphics-based goal - which is actually okay - but should be articulated in both the feedback and the learning targets.) Instead, the feedback could have said, “The goal of this project is to show your understanding of the goddess’ characteristics. Try adding more examples of how these might help her be a good leader that people want to elect.”
Wiggins wrote that feedback needs to be goal-referenced, tangible and transparent, actionable, user-friendly, timely, ongoing and consistent. We are going to apply these to the elements within Microsoft Teams.
& Keys to Effective Feedback
How to Give Effective Feedback to Students in Microsoft Teams - A Few Examples
Feedback in Teams Post
Microsoft Teams Post:
First, let's look at how we can use the Post Feature to provide effective and growth-based feedback. Add a post into a channel so that everyone in that channel can see it. Posts can include text, images, attachments, videos, polls, and more.
Through posts, we can we give important feedback:
- To clarify the learning goals and offer scaffolding.
- Add mentor texts or examples.
- Post good examples and ideas as they come in.
- Repost any answers to questions that have been asked privately - that other students might be struggling with as well.
- Post Screencasts re-explaining an idea or concept students might be struggling with.
- Offer quick tips or tutorials when needed.
- Send students to other places (like Tabs). They can, for instance, do quick checks for understanding using apps like Flipgrid. We can use the data from those checks to post helpful resources that help students improve. Plus, we can offer targeted whole-class feedback based on that data that helps students who are still grappling with ideas. Check out Microsoft Teams Tabs: Create Amazing Interactive Learning Materials
Remember, always start this feedback by being transparent about how this helps the students toward the learning goal.
Feedback in Teams Private Chats
Here, teachers can provide smaller amounts of feedback to individual students that is more individualized and targeted. This is a place to offer some tangible recommendations for that individual student. For the feedback to be meaningful, provide actionable ideas and easily understandable ways to improve in this chat. Help the child feel supported and successful as they progress. Good feedback also includes what the child is doing right.
The private chat can also help teachers with:
- Relationship-building (SEL).
- Keeping students on-task with quick ongoing check-ins.
- Giving students any needed extra attention - with actionable goals.
- Provides an easy location to provide timely feedback.
Note: Timely is more important than immediate. Make sure to allow students the time to struggle and step in with the feedback when it’s going to help them grow - not to stop them from struggling. They need to struggle.
To help make this point, Grant Wiggins suggests, “The more feedback I can receive in real time, the better my ultimate performance will be. This is how all highly successful computer games work. If you play Angry Birds, Halo, Guitar Hero, or Tetris, you know that the key to substantial improvement is that the feedback is both timely and ongoing. When you fail, you can immediately start over—sometimes even right where you left off—to get another opportunity to receive and learn from the feedback.”
More from the above student's example...
Going back to the political campaign example above, one piece of feedback said, “This is a little vague.” The teacher was, in fact, correct, it was. But the 12 year old didn’t know how to make it better and turned to me and asked, “What does she mean by vague?”
What was missing were actions, or specific ways that she might improve. She needed examples of how to make this better and would have benefited by drawing attention to the places where she was really hitting the goal and why. In fact, on the parts where the teacher had pointed out she had done a good job, there was not specific feedback either. There were just the words, “Good job,” which if I could comment back to the teacher, I would have said, “This feedback is a little vague.”
The private chat can also help teachers with:
- Relationship-building (SEL).
- Keeping students on-task with quick ongoing check-ins.
- Giving students any needed extra attention - with actionable goals.
- An easy way to provide timely feedback.
Note: Timely is more important than immediate. Make sure to allow students the time to struggle and step in with the feedback when it’s going to help them grow - not to stop them from struggling. They need to struggle.
Feedback in Microsoft Programs
Within individual Microsoft programs, like Word, PowerPoint and OneNote, students and teachers can leave comments. If a post is like talking in front of the room, and if private comments are like a 1-to-1 conversation, comments in individual programs are like marking up student work. Like writing comments in the margins, suggesting revisions, writing a smiley face on the parts you love.
This kind of feedback should:
- Offer specific changes to individual sentences, slides, cells, etc. in a file based on the learning goal.
- Be timely. It should happen throughout the draft, not at the end.
- Carry on ongoing conversations with nested replies that are action and goal oriented.
- Reply to only one person in the shared program by using the mention or @ feature.
Feedback via Rubrics and Assignments
When we use a rubric, we measure student work against certain success criteria we set before we start. Does it meet our expectations? How can it be improved? This is the focus of rubric feedback (comments and grades on specific parts of the rubric) and general feedback (comments we make on the assignment as a whole).
Many times, we use rubric feedback just to give a grade. It's a summative assessment, when the project is finished. There are BIG problems with this, though. It’s like doing an autopsy on a dead body. The activity or project is over, so there’s no opportunity to improve the work. Think of feedback, instead, as trying to make student work healthy before it’s over.
Feedback needs to be followed by an opportunity to do it over. Without that opportunity to grow, it's not really feedback. It's just a comment.
Instead, let’s use rubric and assignment feedback to give formative feedback. Provide some comments and suggestions. Return it to the student BEFORE the assignment is complete. Let students make improvements and then turn it back in. Worried your students won’t turn work in early? Make it part of the requirements of the assignment -- points for turning in the first time, points for revisions.
Feedback in Private Student Channels
This is a more focused approach to help one or two students who might need more targeted help. If you notice an individual student is struggling, you can open a temporary channel with just you and that student. Offer more resources and specific guidance that might help the student progress toward the learning goal.
Here teachers can help individual students by providing:
- Targeted one-on-one feedback.
- Actionable examples.
- Quick and timely check ins.
- Links to explainer videos, to a tab with a list of Stream videos to help them in areas of need, to individualized teacher-created videos just for their needs.
- Consistent and timely feedback.
- Smaller more concrete goals for these students.
Giving effective feedback to students is one of the best things we can do to help our students grow, but on our end we need to have a learning target in place and the success criteria written down - so our feedback refers can refer back.
