When thinking about faster and smarter feedback and facilitation, we're asking these kinds of questions:

Thinking about these questions leads us to some different approaches to facilitation than just giving learners the answer. Below you'll see a range of approaches.

Some include example phrases (shown in italics). Our main goal for the approaches below is actually "better learning", but a bonus is that these approaches also require more from learners and less from you - freeing up time for you to focus your feedback and efforts where they count most.

We often want to help learners all the time. But sometimes that's just not in the best interest of learning. We learn the most when we do challenging work, make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes. A productive struggle. Below we've got some examples of techniques to intervene less.

When you find ways to help your learners answer their own questions, you're helping them become more metacognitive (better at thinking about thinking). Generally, when you're answering a question with another question, you'll be scaffolding. For example, if Learner A is asking about how style of writing and the thesis of a given essay can be related?" The response might be something like:

Good question [Learner A]. Okay, let's unpack this a bit by answering some related questions. Think about: How would you define thesis statement? What are some characteristics of different writing styles?

Sometimes your learners might be stuck on using one strategy and just need to try another approach. Using phrases like the ones below also help cultivate a growth mindset in learners and grow their toolkit of strategies so they'll be better off next time they're stuck.

This is challenging! I can see you are using your notes. What other strategies could you try?

Let’s review all of your attempts so far and see if we can think of the best course of action.

Remind yourself that you're still learning. Let’s break down the problem/task and walk through it step-by-step. Perhaps you need something specific, a little more information or guidance to get to the next step?

Okay, let’s think about how to approach this differently. Would you like to try [different strategy]?

Novices are sometimes better at explaining ideas to other novices because they're at a more similar level. It can also support social connections which we know is useful in online courses. You might say something like:

That’s a great question [Learner A]. I want to encourage discussion about this question. So I wondered… does anyone else have any thoughts about [Learner’s] questions? Particularly [add clarification to help other learners help Learner A].

In other instances, feedback might not be needed at all, especially if the automatic feedback is clear and supports learners' ability to self-assess. So remember, we don't have to give feedback on everything. A simple way to acknowledge learners might just be with a like (thumbs up) or marking a task as "complete".

Wise interventions are targeted, small interruptions with the hope of disrupting mindsets, beliefs, or processes that are hindering learning. These are what we're talking about when we ask: "What narratives are getting in the way of learning?".

To understand these interventions, we'll take a look at a couple of examples.

Communicating (reasonable) high expectations to learners can increase achievement. One example found that learners did twice as much revision on an essay with this message:

“I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them,”

As compared to:

“I’m giving you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper.”

Another example helped students understand that worries about belonging are normal in the transition to a new school but dissipate with time. Learning and reflecting on this information in a 1-hour exercise led to African American college students’ halving the racial achievement gap, and reporting being happier and healthier at the end of college.

The Culture Code describes a study that found people were 4x more likely to let a stranger borrow their phone if the stranger prefaced with “I’m so sorry about the rain.” Empathising statements like this can lead to a striking shift in behaviour because they signal a relationship, which changes a lot about how a brain responds to a request.

Small personal statements - referencing something a learner said earlier, an aspiration they shared, or empathising with struggles - can have the same effect.

When you ask: "Who's doing the work in this class?" the answer should be "learners". Because if they're not working, they're probably not learning. Below we've got two general approaches to help get learners involved.

If promoting correct use or technique, instead of providing the corrections, you could

tell learners the number of errors and let them know that to get marks, they must find the errors and fix them.

As this technique focuses on identifying errors, you don't want to overuse this one as it could be demotivating for learners. It's best used for very focused skills that are a requirement of the course e.g. citations and paraphrasing. For instance you might have one small section of an assessment where you acknowledge their good work on the content of their assessment, then say:

"... your last task for this assessment is to find the [x] fixes to citations and [y] small formatting changes to meet APA referencing. If you get stuck [link to resource] but I'm sure you'll be on your way once you spot them."

You could follow this general approach to help learners self-assess.

Your role in this approach is mainly asking questions and helping learners to orient in the right direction. Learners have already laid the groundwork, allowing you to jump in at a high level.

One last time-saving option is to feedback with audio or video instead. In iQualify you also have the option to give your feedback via video or audio. You could even hold a mini conference - a 5(ish) minute one-on-one opportunity to offer individualized instruction and feedback, fix misconceptions, build relationships, and give learners the opportunity to be heard.

We hope that by dividing up the activities into daily and weekly that it might save you time and help to switch between the items that require specific attention and when you're looking to identify patterns more broadly.