Webinar #1:
The Power of Feedback:
An Interactive Chat with
John Hattie

Our webinar plans with John Hattie began with our team discussing the myriad ways we ask for, use, and provide feedback in classrooms. We wanted to help teachers with a powerful feedback tool, and we wanted to get it right.

We knew we needed to talk with John.

John Hattie is the international best-seller author of the Visible Learning Series and The Distance Learning Playbook. His educational research background at the University of Melbourne has led him to review over 100,000 studies and 1,600 meta-analyses, and he has reviewed school achievement for over 500 million students. He has identified about 300 influences on student achievement and has measured their effectiveness. 

Clearly, John was the one with the data about what makes feedback effective.

The rich discussion with John over Zoom and Google Hangouts that followed resulted in a deeper understanding of effective feedback for the NextLesson/GrokSpot Team and a clear sense of how to help teachers gather meaningful feedback. 

We learned that students are ready to give teachers feedback, but they wanted something in return.

Our discussion with John sharpened once the pandemic began, and we pondered the ins and outs of feedback with distance learning. As John was writing The Distance Learning Playbook, with Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher, we mapped out new features and adjustments to make our feedback tool, GrokSpot, more powerful for a virtual environment.

Quickly we realized there is one big and straightforward question which guides our daily instruction and planning in classrooms:

How will I know they got it? (How will I know they got it…remotely?)

John’s research has shown that we can ask students and that they will be honest. Classrooms with a “feedback culture” are classrooms where students receive feedback and act on it. They are confident that errors are opportunities and, like Michael Jordan, continue to shoot for the basket working on improvement, not perfection.

In other words, they are honest about their assessment of their learning, and they know how to receive feedback and act upon it. 

Join us on October 8, 2020, at 4:00 PM PT for a frank discussion and insights into building a resilient feedback culture in your classroom whether you are teaching remotely, hybrid, or in-person.

Don’t miss it!