Bill Ferriter (@plugusin) is a sixth-grade science teacher in a PLC-driven school near Raleigh, North Carolina. A National Board Certified Teacher and the author or co-author of 10 books about PLCs, digital learning and effective assessment, Bill writes and speaks frequently about integrating meaningful student-involved assessment and feedback opportunities into classroom instruction.
Bill, a long-time friend of ABPC, worked closely with PLC advocates Rick and Becky DuFour for several years and has also served as a teacher in residence at the Center for Teaching Quality. He maintains a popular blog, The Tempered Radical, where he writes regularly about teaching in today’s world.
Notably, throughout his education career, Bill has continued to teach daily in his year-round public school. I was particularly interested in talking to him about some of the ideas found in his most recent book from Solution Tree, Creating a Culture of Feedback, written with Paul J. Cancellieri.
CATHY: Bill, the educators in our ABPC networks have been working on student-engaged assessment for several years now – using Ron Berger’s Leaders of Their Own Learning as a guiding text. While most teachers are now using student-friendly learning targets and embedding checks for understanding, there is still some reluctance to move to peer feedback. In what ways did you make that journey with your students? What advice can you share with colleagues from Alabama?
BILL: Oftentimes, teachers hesitate to integrate peer feedback into the work that they do with students because we aren’t sure that students CAN give one another meaningful and productive feedback. That’s a legitimate worry given that most students have little experience giving feedback to – and receiving feedback from – one another in traditional classrooms.
The solution, though, isn’t to avoid peer feedback. The solution is to give students lots of experience and practice with peer feedback. The more structured opportunities that students have giving and receiving feedback with one another, the more skilled they will become. And the more skilled that students become with peer feedback, the less teachers have to worry about whether or not the experience will be worthwhile.
The fact of the matter is that the constraints of the modern classroom – 25-30 students with a wide range of abilities and academic needs – makes it nearly impossible for teachers alone to provide feedback to learners in the classroom. If timely and directive feedback is the key to improved student learning, we NEED to teach students to look for guidance and support from one another.
CATHY: What has been your greatest surprise related to the use of peer feedback?
BILL: Once, I surveyed my students about our peer feedback work. They told me overwhelmingly that they LOVED giving feedback to and receiving feedback from their peers.
At first I thought, “That makes sense. They are at the age where the opinion of their peers matters more than the opinion of their parents and teachers.” As I dug through their responses, though, I learned that their passion for peer feedback had nothing to do with WHO was giving the feedback. Instead, they had recognized that they could get peer feedback a heck of a lot faster than they ever got feedback from me!
“When we turn work in to you, Mr. F,” they said time and again, “we don’t see it again for weeks. When we do peer feedback, we know how we did right away.”
That’s interesting, isn’t it? Students crave feedback no matter who it comes from.
CATHY: What can teachers anticipate and/or preplan to ensure that peer feedback is on track? Berger advises us: Be Kind, Be Specific, Be Helpful.
BILL: I think the most important steps that teachers can take to ensure that peer feedback experiences are productive is to encourage students to give each other observations instead of evaluations.
Statements like, “I really like…” , “You’ve done a great job on…” or “You need to improve your…” are super common in the work that peers do with one another. But they are also evaluative – implying a judgment. That’s when peer feedback can feel intimidating and awkward.
Sometimes peers shy away from providing negative feedback because they are afraid of hurting feelings. Sometimes peers are hesitant to take feedback from one another because they don’t see classmates as authority figures capable of making accurate judgments. The result is mediocre feedback, hurt feelings, or both.
Instead, students need to learn to use statements like “I notice that…” or “I’m not sure that I see….in your work.” Those phrases don’t imply a judgment at all, leaving the recipient to decide what the feedback means about the overall quality of his/her final product.
Encouraging students to make observations instead of evaluations depends on nothing more than sharing lots of examples of sentence starters with students.
Another step that teachers can take is to provide students with lists of sample comments gathering during previous peer feedback sessions and then ask the students to identify the statements that are observations and the statements that are evaluations. They get it.
CATHY: Are there any other insights about peer feedback that you would like to share?
BILL: British educator Dylan Wiliam, a prominent advocate for formative assessment, likes to argue that we need to turn feedback into “detective work.” His central proposition is a simple one: The best feedback is gathered by – rather than given to – learners.
Well-structured peer feedback experiences give BOTH of the students involved — the giver and the recipient — chances to act like detectives by reflecting on success criteria and then determining how well individual work products align with those criteria. That means time spent in peer feedback experiences is time that everyone spends learning.
CATHY: Thanks, Bill! You’ve shared some great insights from your own classroom with us.
See more of Bill’s presentation slides at his Flickr account.
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