Checking for Understanding & Feedback
Whole-Class Feedback
Read every book, write on one sheet, and teach the patterns you found next lesson
Use this when
What is it?
Whole-Class Feedback is the practice of reading a full set of books without writing a comment in any of them. Instead, you collect what you notice on a single sheet: shared strengths, the errors that keep appearing, spelling, lines worth sharing and a few students to see. The next lesson opens with you teaching from that sheet, and students then improve their own work while the piece is still fresh in their minds. The feedback arrives as teaching, with time to act on it built in, which is where written comments tend to fall down.
The steps
- Rule one sheet into five boxes before you open a book. Label them: strengths, common errors, spelling and vocabulary, best lines, students to see. Everything you write goes on this sheet.
- Read the whole set in one sitting, pen on the sheet. Tally each error every time it appears. Copy out a line worth sharing when you come across one. Expect a minute or two per book, and more for longer essays.
- Choose the one or two errors that matter most. Plan how you will reteach them: a model, a worked example, or a weak paragraph rewritten well. Smaller errors can wait until a later piece.
- Open the next lesson from the sheet. Start with the strengths, naming students where you can. Then introduce the pattern:I've read everyone's book. Two things went really well, one mistake came up again and again, and we're going to fix it together.
- Reteach the main error to everyone. Show a weak version and a strong version of the same sentence or working, and ask the class to name the difference before you confirm it.
- Give improvement time straight away. Students redraft the part of their own work that the reteach applies to. Use this time to sit with the names in your students-to-see box.
What it looks like
Mrs Egan's class of 13-year-olds wrote an essay last Thursday on why castles changed over time. She read all twenty-eight books on Sunday with one sheet beside her: forty minutes in all, and the books stayed clean. Monday's lesson opens with the sheet on the board. "Two things went well. Nearly everyone used dates accurately, and Amara's opening line is on the screen. Read it with me." Then comes the pattern: nineteen essays said that stone is stronger than wood without explaining why that mattered in a siege. She shows a weak sentence beside a full one, and the class names the difference.
As redrafting begins, Dev flicks through his book, frowning. "You haven't marked mine, Miss." "I read every word of yours. The second slide was about your paragraph two. That's your redraft." He turns back a page and starts writing.
How you’ll know it’s working
- A class set is read, and the sheet filled, in about an hour rather than over several evenings.
- The next lesson visibly opens from the sheet, and students hear findings drawn from their own work.
- During improvement time, most pens are moving on a redraft while the teacher sits with the students-to-see names.
- The sheet's main error appears less often in the next piece of work, and comparing one sheet's tally with the next makes the change visible.
Pitfalls & fixes
- Reading out every error. A twenty-minute tour of the whole sheet teaches none of it well. Choose one or two errors instead and teach them properly, with a model.
- A reteach with no redraft. If the lesson moves straight on, the sheet changes nothing in the books. Protect ten minutes of improvement time in the same lesson, every time.
- Losing the individuals. Some errors belong to a single student, and a whole-class reteach will not reach them. Use the students-to-see box for exactly this, and sit with those names during improvement time.
- A sheet that turns into marking. Writing full sentences about thirty books recreates the workload you set out to cut. Tallies, initials and short fragments are enough, because you are the sheet's only reader.
Weigh it up
Why it’s worth it
- The time cost of a class set falls from several hours of written comments to about an hour of reading and one sheet.
- Feedback arrives the next lesson, as teaching, and you can watch students act on it. A margin comment is read alone, if it is read at all.
- The sheets build into a dated record of what each class could and could not do, which sharpens how you plan the topic the next time you teach it.
- Reading the best lines aloud raises the status of written work, and students begin writing to be read.
- The reteach revisits the content itself, so the class receives consolidation of the topic alongside the feedback.
The costs
- Students no longer receive a personal comment, and some genuinely miss it. The students-to-see conversations soften this loss without fully replacing it.
- It costs lesson time: the reteach and the redraft take ten to fifteen minutes of the next lesson, every time you use it.
- Many schools still require written evidence in books. Check your marking policy, and agree the change with a leader before you stop writing comments.
Adaptations
- Early years / lower primary: written sets are short, so the reading is quick. Deliver the findings orally, showing one strong and one weak example under a visualiser (a document camera).
- Secondary exam classes: add a sixth box for exam technique, and turn the common-errors box into the next lesson's Do Now questions.
- Post-16 / adult: talk through the sheet, then share it as a document. Older students can check their own redrafts against it independently.
- Maths, science and practical subjects: the technique is not only for essays. A set of maths books, lab write-ups or photographed project work reveals its patterns just as quickly.
Where this comes from
Whole-Class Feedback grew out of UK classroom practice and spread through schools in the late 2010s, as teachers such as Jo Facer and Ben Newmark wrote up their schools' moves away from written comments; no single codifier owns it. The research base underneath it is the feedback literature: the EEF's guidance concludes that the principles of feedback matter more than whether it arrives in writing or in speech. The one-sheet format itself has not been trialled directly.
Sources
Related techniques
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