Every year the Irish Teaching Council organize 'FEILTE' - the Festival of Education In Learning and Teaching Excellence where a mix of showcases and workshops spanning projects from across the education sector, demonstrate the innovation happening in teaching and learning at the moment.

This year the event took place on October 4th and I was lucky enough to be selected to present on my use of on-going feedback and specifically "How student feedback changed my classroom". The official title was "The Irish Abroad: A look at the action research projects undertaken by Irish teachers in a Swiss International School". My colleague, Dublin born Ronan Lynch, joined me and he started our workshop with an overall presentation on the professional learning programme here in our school. I then went on to explain how I use feedback in my class to increase motivation and student ownership of their learning by modeling various methods of feedback collection I use in my class.

Some of the most popular ones with the group were the really simple ones like "close your eyes and show me with your hands your understanding of how to give feedback. 1 finger being no understanding at all and 5 being that you consider yourself an expert". This is such a simple method that can be used at any time in the class to get into the heads of your students and find out what they really know or understand about a concept. It is also a very safe method for the students as they can safely say they have no idea without the fear of being ridiculed or feeling silly in front of their peers.

Another very simple method that the participants really liked was the 'one minute summary'. We actually did this with them at the end of our workshop where we asked those in attendance to write down two things they liked from the session and one burning question they had. The idea is they first see if the person next to them can answer their question and if not then the teacher can answer it in the next class. This can be adapted in lots of different ways but essentially you use the 'power of the post-it' to get some quick feedback from the class as to what methods are helping them and what they still need help with.

Please feel free to contact me directly for any further information on the use of feedback in the classroom. You can also check out the full Prezi by clicking here.