Abstract

This paper put forward an in-depth reflection grounded on two studies. The first regards to doctoral research designed to investigate teachers ‘interpretations of feedback in terms of theory and practice and it explores how this might be informed by their conceptions of how students learn. The inquiry involves three Year 5 and one Year 4 teachers from three different primary schools in London. The main sources of data comprise classroom observation and teachers’ interviews focusing on teachers’ feedback practices and the underlying principles that guide them in the actual conducting of classroom interaction and through pupils written assignments. Analysis suggested that feedback focused on correcting basics errors, seeking further actions on the task at hand and contrasting the work with learning objective and success criteria. The main lessons learnt from the practices and views held by teachers in England were distilled into little stories and made them accessible to other teachers to help them to reflect on their own positions on the feedback issues. This was endeavoured in the context of the work in Chile within a teacher professional development programme with 60 enrolled primary school teachers. They were asked to select written assignments stemming from their pupils work to design written feedback for these tasks. This is followed by an iterative process of reflection about the messages conveyed through their comments. Data show that the teachers faced difficulties at the initial stages of development as their comments were evaluative, that is, centred on what was missing, with little room for students’ self-assessment. The participants greatly improved their elaborated comments as being more descriptive, and with a focal point on the task features. Both studies provide insightful data in terms of the problematic nature of teachers’ comments as pupils cannot achieve a broader understanding of quality within their pieces of work. It seems that teachers still hold a remedial approach to feedback. (Black & Wiliam, 2012, Swaffield, S. 2011; Sadler, 2007,2010).