The quality of learning interactions between teachers and students is central to the learning process. Interactions may be seen as a form of feedback, and there are two distinct purposes here: feedback to teachers that informs their decisions, and feedback to students that helps them learn. And, while powerful feedback is a crucial feature of effective interactions between teachers and students, there is no simple recipe for it.

Information from questioning and assessment is the basis of feedback from students to teachers. Great teachers understand that, alongside the quality of the information generated, what matters is how they respond to it.

Great teachers use this information to identify, decide and implement what happens next from a set of robust options. They understand that each option has trade-offs between, for example, time, effort and reward; if some students need more time and help with a topic while others are ready to move on, for example, this may be a hard choice to make.

Feedback also goes the other way: from the teachers to the students. This form of feedback can help by clarifying or emphasising goals or success criteria, thereby directing students’ attention to productive next steps, or by drawing attention to a gap between actual and desired levels of performance.

In this course, you’ll learn about interacting for two classroom goals:

1. to provide feedback to teachers; and
2. to provide feedback to students.

Over the first six weeks of this course, you’ll explore the evidence on effective interacting, initially thinking about responding appropriately to feedback from students about their thinking, knowledge and understanding. You’ll then go on to learn about giving students actionable feedback to guide their next steps in learning.

In the final two weeks, once you have thought hard about the principles underpinning effective interacting, you’ll move on to practise the act of selecting and adapting strategies for use in the classroom, based on your growing knowledge.