Fisher & Frey: Feed-Up, Feedback, & Feed-Forward

In their Saturday session, "Feed-Up, Feedback, and Feed-Forward," Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey talk about teachers spending WAY too much time on feedback. "Feedback is very popular, but you can spend three hours grading every essay, marking every error in spelling, transition, and grammar, but it's important to remember that the students gave you the best that they had at the time. Now they are going to do one of two things with your feedback. They are either going to throw it away and take the grade or they are going to revise what you told them to do. Now their essays reflect about 25 percent of your work, not theirs."

Fisher and Frey  emphasize that we have to be very careful about feedback—it is not formative assessment. "The critical component to feedback is to transfer the responsibility back to the student."

How have you successfully done that in your own teaching?