Verbal feedback – How spoken messages can reduce workload
Let’s stop writing feedback no one ever reads and instead embrace a smarter, more verbal approach to marking, says Gordon Cairns
To the surprise of no one familiar with the sight of a stack of marking on the kitchen table after a day’s teaching, a 2018 DfE report on staff retention found that a key reason for teachers leaving the profession was workload issues – and particularly the volume of marking.
The report quoted one exasperated former science teacher as saying, “There were ridiculous marking schemes, eight coloured pens and five symbols; it took me three hours a day to get through all the marking.”
Grades and substance
Yet despite all the time and effort frequently invested in writing comments on students’ work, experienced teachers are all too aware of the weaknesses surrounding this specific form of feedback.
How often have you highlighted an area to improve on in your comments, only to see the same mistake appear in the next piece of work? Or had a student complain that comments you stayed up late to write are as indecipherable as Egyptian hieroglyphics?
More recent research suggests little has changed. One study found that if an answer paper has both feedback and a specific grade on it, the recipient will overlook even the most carefully crafted list of next steps. Instead, they’ll fixate on the number or letter beside it, thus ignoring the most important aspect of the assessment – what they should learn from it.
Verbal feedback revolution
However, it seems a revolution in time management may be starting to take hold in classrooms across the country. Savvy teachers are realising that capturing recorded voice notes via mobile apps – Showbie being one example – has the potential to free up hours of their precious time throughout the working week.
While there have yet to be any formal studies into this approach at the secondary phase, the benefits would appear to extend beyond just the obvious time savings. Students seem to often respond more positively to the individualised nature of verbal feedback compared to written comments. This is regardless of how personally you’ve framed that written message to them.
Research conducted among higher education students has, however, found that recorded verbal feedback helps to create a more personal and authentic connection with learners; connections that can be more developmental than prescriptive.
The same study further found that students frequently prefer the more informal nature of verbal feedback. This builds a positive pastoral relationship between tutor and student, whilst also boosting students’ sense of being cared for. This encourages them in their learning and helps to improve their levels of confidence and self-esteem. It’s not too much of a stretch to assume that school students are likely to experience similar pastoral benefits of their own.
Pain-free privacy
That said, one key advantage of written feedback is the natural pause between the submission of work and its subsequent return. Receiving verbal feedback immediately can be emotionally overwhelming. This is especially true if a student is highly invested in their work, irrespective of whether the feedback is good or bad. Some students simply don’t like receiving praise in front of their classmates.
On the other hand, students can listen to recorded messages in private, in a way that may even reduce the chances that a student responds negatively.
If you need any further convincing, consider how it’s often easier to amend mistakes in verbal comments by simply re-recording messages, rather than erasing and rewriting them.
Moreover, Victorians who could afford washing machines soon found themselves with more time on their hands – hands that tended to be less sore. Many readers will know that there’s nothing quite like the pain between the fingers caused by holding a pen for too long, and this too could be alleviated by adopting verbal feedback methods.
If and when more teachers start to embrace audio recordings as a viable form of verbal feedback, who knows what it might lead to? With any luck, a reduction in the number of teachers currently leaving the profession.
Gordon Cairns is an English and forest school teacher who works in a unit for secondary pupils with ASD; he also writes about education, society, cycling and football for a number of publications
