Whole Class Feedback
Read the set and identify patterns: common strengths, recurring errors, one priority next step. Teach to the gap, not to each paper. Sustainable for teachers; precise for students.
Find this under Make feedback more useful
The strategy, as published
Exactly as it appears on the card
Part of Source & Direction 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
Reading a class set reveals things no single script can: the same misconception in eleven books, a strength half the class shares, one gap that would repay whole-class teaching. Whole class feedback works from those patterns. Teach to the gap, not to each paper.
It is sustainable for you and precise for pupils, a rare combination in feedback. Thirty individual paragraphs saying the same thing serve nobody better than one well-taught response to the pattern.
What it might look like
One version of it, in a classroom
After reading a set of essays without writing in them, a teacher notes three recurring issues and one common strength. Next lesson opens with the pattern: what this class does well, the error many share, the one improvement to make now. Pupils then find and fix that issue in their own work.
Try it
A way to begin
Read your next set with a blank sheet beside you and nothing in your pen for the books. Record patterns only, and build the follow-up lesson from the sheet.
What to notice
Reading what happens
- Whether pupils can locate the general point in their own work, which is the step where whole class feedback succeeds or fails.
- How your reading changes when you are hunting patterns rather than composing comments.
Things to think about
Before and while you use it
- Some pupils will need the bridge built for them: the class-level point and their own page are not automatically connected. A quick check on who has found their own example is worth the two minutes.
- Whole class feedback replaces some individual marking, not all of it. Which pieces still need an individual response is a judgement about the work and the class.
Technology second
Where technology fits
A shared display or class document is where the patterns become teachable: common strengths and errors laid out once, visible to everyone, annotated live as the class works through them. Kept in the approved shared space in your setting, the same document becomes a running record of what this class has been taught to fix, which is useful the next time a pattern threatens to return.
The wider thinking
Where the evidence sits
This is Wiliam's formative logic applied at class scale, and it reflects Hattie and Timperley's point that feedback informs the teacher as much as the taught: the set tells you what to do next. The card’s attribution stands as published: Wiliam; Hattie.
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.