Yesterday after school, our middle and senior leadership were discussing the ethos and rationale behind our approach to feedback here at the college. Our latest collective work scrutiny tells us that we still have some inconsistency in how we encourage students to respond to our marking. We agreed that ensuring that our marking is acted upon is a key priority for the college; we also agreed that it’s one of the few tried-and-tested, evidence-based approaches to teaching and learning. Dylan Wiliam writes:

 [Feedback] should be productive—the only interesting thing that feedback does is what it does to the learner, and specifically whether it prompts them to do what we want them to do (raise aspiration, or increase effort, according to the situation), which is why I suggest that feedback should, in general, be more work for the recipient than the donor.  

This will be the first of a series of posts looking at how we our student are creatively and constructively using purple pen across the college to respond to our feedback. Nick and Liam shared a fantastic approach with us on Monday.

 Using collective feedback grids to structure whole class feedback – that is followed up with structure DIRT activties – is an excellent approach, that can also save considerable time. Check out their approach here. For more approaches to using purple pen, check out our college document Responding to feedback.