Teaching Learners to Notice: Introduction

The University of Canberra’s Teaching and Learning Centre has hosted a presentation by Professor Royce Sadler on assessment and feedback. The title of his talk was  Reworking the concept of feedback: Teaching learners to notice
The trail for the presentation was:

Teachers in higher education often feel frustrated by the modest impact the feedback they provide on student works seems to have in improving student learning. In this presentation, the dependence on feedback is challenged primarily on the grounds that it involves ‘telling’. For students to become self-sustaining producers of high quality intellectual and professional ‘goods’, they must be progressively equipped to take control of their own learning and performance. The alternative way forward begins with a close examination of the conditions under which students can become better at monitoring the emerging quality of their work during the production process. This requires a reworking of teacher‑learner interactions, which not only challenges the dominant feedback‑based paradigm, but also has better prospects of developing independence in learning.

With my interests in observation and feedforward I was an early sign up for the presentation. The title of Royce’s presentation did remind me of Ian Franks and Gary Miller’s (1991) paper Training Coaches to Observe and Remember.
Photo Credit
Professor Emeritus Royce Sadler