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Build Feedback Literacy

The strategy, as published

Exactly as it appears on the card

Part of Feedback & the Learner in 03 Feedback, where it sits alongside its neighbouring strategies, the infographic and the thinking for the whole area.

Why you might use it

The problem it may help with

Pupils are rarely taught how to read feedback, and it shows. A comment that seems transparent to the teacher who wrote it can be opaque to the pupil holding it, and acting on feedback is a skill with steps: understand the comment, locate it in the work, know the move it asks for.

Carless and Boud call this feedback literacy, and their point is on the card: it is taught, not assumed.

What it might look like

One version of it, in a classroom

Before returning the first marked piece of the year, a teacher puts one of her own typical comments on the board and walks through it: here is what it says, here is what it means, here is what I would do in response. Pupils then decode one of their own comments in pairs before acting alone.

Try it

A way to begin

Take the card's own script into your next return-of-work lesson: one comment, modelled aloud, meaning and next move included, before pupils touch their own.

What to notice

Reading what happens

  • The questions pupils ask about comments. Fewer what-does-this-mean questions over a term is the literacy building.
  • Whether the modelling transfers: can pupils decode a comment shaped differently from the one you modelled?

Things to think about

Before and while you use it

  • Literacy is easier to build when there is a consistent shape to read. If your comments follow a predictable pattern, pupils can learn that pattern; comments written differently every time keep them beginners.

Inclusive practice

The lens this connects with

Through the inclusive practice lens, this is one of the approaches that may reduce barriers around:

The wider thinking

Where the evidence sits

Feedback literacy is Carless and Boud's term for the learner's side of the exchange: the capacity to understand, evaluate and use what comes back, without which the teacher's side achieves little. The card’s attribution stands as published: Carless; Boud.

The fuller picture, sources included, is in further reading and evidence for Feedback.

Keep exploring

Where next?

Back to this strategy in 03 Feedback, across to what you're trying to improve, or into all 144 at once.

Want to take this further?

Support is available

Pedagogy First gives you a starting point. If you want support exploring how approaches like this can work across your school, trust or professional learning programme, that work is available.

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