Seven Principles of Good Practice
Audit your practice against Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick's seven principles. Do you clarify criteria? Enable self-assessment? Encourage dialogue? Close the gap? Redesign where you do not.
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
Sometimes the most useful move is an audit rather than a new strategy. Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick's seven principles offer the checklist: do you clarify criteria, enable self-assessment, encourage dialogue, help close the gap? The card's instruction is direct: redesign where you do not.
The card names four of the principles as its worked examples; the full seven are worth having to hand for the audit. Good feedback practice clarifies what good performance looks like, develops self-assessment and reflection, delivers high quality information to pupils about their learning, encourages dialogue around learning with teachers and peers, encourages positive motivational beliefs, provides opportunities to close the gap between current and desired performance, and gives teachers information they can use to shape their teaching.
Their deeper argument, picked up throughout this strand, is that feedback belongs inside self-regulation. Its job is to make pupils better at judging and improving their own work, not more dependent on yours.
What it might look like
One version of it, in a classroom
A teacher audits one unit against the principles and finds two absences: pupils never self-assess before submitting, and no comment ever gets a reply. She changes only those two things for the next unit and leaves what already works alone.
What to notice
Reading what happens
- Which principles your practice already covers without ever having named them, and which are absent entirely.
- Whether the redesigns hold once the unit is underway, or fall away under time pressure. What falls first shows you what to protect.
Things to think about
Before and while you use it
- An audit of everything changes nothing. One unit, honestly examined, beats a whole curriculum skimmed.
The wider thinking
Where the evidence sits
Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick built on Sadler's foundations, reframing feedback around the pupil's growing power of self-regulation; the seven principles are that argument in usable form. The card’s attribution stands as published: Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick.
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.