Medical vs. Post-Mortem:

A Quick Review As we explored at the beginning of this course, Douglas Reeves compares effective feedback to medical intervention.

• A Post-Mortem tells you why the patient died. It accurately judges what has already happened, looking backward at the work.
• A Medical tells you how to get healthy. It diagnoses issues while there is still time to improve, looking forward to the student's future capabilities.

When teachers fall into the trap of correcting every single error on a piece of work, they are performing a post-mortem. It improves the document, but it does not necessarily improve the learner. The ultimate purpose of feedback is to help the learner do a better job at some point in the future on a similar task they have not yet attempted

Making the Shift

Feedback as Detective Work How do we actually shift our feedback from a post-mortem to a medical? According to Professor Dylan Wiliam, we must adhere to a fundamental rule of teaching: feedback should always be more work for the recipient than the donor.

If you are pointing out every specific error and telling the student exactly how to fix it, you are doing the thinking for them. As cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham states, "memory is the residue of thought"—meaning students only remember what they have actually had to think about. When we spoon-feed corrections, students produce better work in the moment, but they don't do any long-term learning.

To make your feedback cause thinking, you must shift from giving feedback as information to giving feedback as detective work. Give the student a puzzle or a task to solve.

Here are a few examples of what this shift looks like in practice:

• In Mathematics:
  • Feedback as Information: Marking 15 equations with a tick and putting a red cross next to the 5 incorrect equations.
  • Feedback as Detective Work: Telling the student, "Five of these are wrong. You find them, you fix them".
• In English / Humanities:
  • Feedback as Information: "You need to add more factual details to support your argument in your third paragraph".
  • Feedback as Detective Work: "One of these paragraphs could do with adding more factual details to support your argument. Identify it, provide the missing data".
• Across Multiple Subjects:
  • English teacher Charlotte Kerrigan created a brilliant detective work activity by handing back groups of unmarked essays, while providing her written feedback on separate strips of paper. The students' task was to read the feedback and match the correct comments to the correct essays.

By withholding the complete solution and turning feedback into detective work, you force the student to cognitively engage with their mistakes, ensuring that your feedback improves the learner, not just the work