Teach Secondary Issue 13.6

move away. Come back in a fewminutes to check that they have responded. This is a useful feedback strategy, as it requires immediate action from the student. Obviously, it is unrealistic to think that you will be able to do this for every student in every lesson. However, once you get into the habit of doing this while circling the classroom, over the course of a week or a unit of work you will be able to get around every student. Checklists All too often, PE teachers use ‘non-doers’ (students who are injured or otherwise unable to take part in the practical lesson) as coaches or to provide feedback for a partner. Understanding assessment criteria or identifying areas of weakness in a practical performance, however, requires expert subject knowledge. Understanding and articulating the specifics about how to improve is hard enough as it is for some adults. It could therefore be reasonably suggested that students might struggle to provide accurate, detailed and correct feedback. There is a very real risk that by misinterpreting the criteria, students will give incorrect feedback to either their peers or themselves and embed misconceptions. Away to try to alleviate this is through the use of checklists. If they are concise and specific, they can be given to students who are tackling problems – perhaps a theoretical concept or task in a theory lesson, or the development of a certain skill in a practical lesson – to help them ensure that they are responding appropriately. The checklist will provide students with an evaluative resource which they can use while completing their work. For example, students often struggle with answering 9-mark questions. Rather than waiting for them to make the mistakes and having to provide individual feedback later, why not first provide students with a checklist form they can use, like the example pictured above? Whole-class feedback When I think back to my NQT year, I would spend a lot of time walking around the room giving students feedback on individual mistakes that they were making. If I had paused and taken a step back, I would have noticed that the mistakes could have been rectified by stopping the task and giving some whole-class feedback . Besides the obvious time-saving benefits, this gives youmore control over the interpretation of your feedback. If you offer 32 different pieces of feedback, it is very difficult to control how they’re interpreted, or what is done with them. Whole-class feedback can help you restore this control by, for example, letting you tweak a drill so that the focus of the students’ practice is sharpened in line with the feedback you have just given. The power of feedback lies in what students do with it. Following verbal feedback, it is therefore important to check students’ understanding of what they have been told, and how they are going to use it to change something in their work. ABOUT THE AUTHOR James Crane is assistant headteacher at Durrington High School and deputy director at Durrington Research School; this article is based on excerpt from his book, Making Every PE Lesson Count – Six Principles to Support Great Physical Education Teaching (£14.99, Crown House Publishing) REFLECTIVE QUESTIONS Do you ensure that students respond to the feedback that you give them? Does your feedback help to inform your planning? Are students given sufficient time and guidance to interpret and use your feedback? Are your feedback techniques manageable and sustainable? How do you ensure that the feedback you give is actioned by students? Do you use formative assessment strategies to support your targeted feedback? Step Action Completed? 1 Box the command word, circle the marks, identify the correct structure of the response 2 Underline the key words and the sport. Define the key words. 3 Apply the key words to the relevant sport. 4 Give five AO3 sentences, leading to a well-rounded conclusive comment. 79 teachwire.net/secondary P H Y S I C A L E D U C AT I O N