I had recently read a blog post from a secondary school teacher about how ineffective written feedback is. He talked about spending hours at home marking books only to have the children ignore all his hard work. The alternative that he found was to conference with each child and getting them to make notes during this discussion.
I thought this was brilliant for older children!
I have always written feedback for my students, but now that I think about it, I'm not sure why. There is no reason that older students can't make notes themselves. It makes them responsible for their work and they really can't say, "I didn't know what to do," because they heard you and they have evidence of the notes they took. I think it is important to make sure that this conferencing process takes place AFTER they had checked their work for errors themselves and with a partner.
When in a Year 5 class I found the children were more than capable of giving each other something to work on based on our writing genre checklists (see an example of one here). The children had to look through their work for surface features first (I found that they could see these better than the deeper feature errors). As they looked through their work they had to tick off what they had checked and if they had completed that well. They could then see what they needed to work on. Once this was done they then had to go and see two people and go through the process again. I found that by the time they got to me they could articulate (not all of them obviously) what they needed to work on and I could then give them tips on how to reach their next step. Here is where I would add the idea of the children writing the notes down independently.
What we do have to remember is that, yes giving our students ownership of their learning and also reducing our workload is great but, in the primary sector, this will not be something that all children will be able to do. With my Year 2 class I got them to go through the same process as above but when giving verbal feedback I had to write the notes for them. They would not be ready to do that themselves, especially when some of them are still learning to write simple sentences. You are welcome to view my Year 2 feedback blog post here. The same can be said for older students who struggle with written language. The process is already very taxing for them so I would write those notes for them. It's all about catering to their individual needs but also staying sane in the process.
I know that I had to remind myself that this is a skill many children have not been taught before. Most marking was done for them, give them time and they will get there. Just be prepared for your conferences to take a long time at the beginning. Also, I don't think you have to give a full blown rundown of a piece of writing with every student every day. They will be in different places within the writing process. I found that having a group that would get a full run down and then the rest would get just verbal feedback, worked for me.
The hardest part is finding something that works well for you and your children, while still providing quality feedback. All in all, it's about balance of both written and verbal feedback depending on your student's needs. Good luck!
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