My world on the web
If we are to show our school communities, and the rest of the world for that matter, that our schools are more than child care during the day and that school leaders and teachers engage in learning that is equally as powerful as the learning students are supposed to engage in, then we have to understand what feedback is all about and how it can be impactful.
Respecting that feedback is a process, not a one-sided message
Closing the gap between desired and current performance
Appreciating the impact of feedback on self-regulated learning
Feedback is powerful, but also problematic. For me, what DeWitt highlights is the power and importance of creating the right conditions.
In a separate celebration, Tom Sherrington reflects upon twenty years since the publication of Working Inside The Black Box.
Education departments are increasingly investing in student surveys to improve classroom standards. But a study has found teachers don’t change their practice in response to student feedback.
When you share a First Verbal Prototype, you activate a feedback loop to develop your creative ideas.
Remember, the only thing worse than a bad idea is to isolate an idea from feedback for too long.
Feedback is oxygen for your ideas. It will help them grow and get stronger, starved of it, and your ideas weaken.
Formative assessment is a proven technique for improving student learning, and the strategies shared here by Jay McTighe work both in the classroom and remotely.
I feel the right technique often depends on the context and situation, online included. For example, I remember using misconceptions in mathematics and response systems for exit tickets.
Marking is intense because it is both physically and intellectually demanding. It is also a core part of our role as teachers, and thus unavoidable. I’m a high school English teacher, so I feel lik…
We also want students to know that there are lots of interesting ways to be right in math class, and that wrong answers are useful for learning. That’s why we ask students to estimate, argue, notice, and wonder. It’s why we have built so many tools for facilitating conversations in math class. It’s also why we don’t generally give students immediate feedback that their answers are “right” or “wrong.” That kind of feedback often ends productive conversations before they begin.
The key is to understand that this feedback isn’t just feedback — it’s a vital cue about the relationship. The reason this works so well has to do with the way our brains are built. Evolution has built us to be cagey with our efforts; after all, engagement is expensive from a biological standpoint. But when we receive an authentic, crystal-clear signal of social trust, belonging, and high expectations, the floodgates click open.
I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.
The question regarding retakes isn’t simply, “Should students get a second chance?” Rather, it is, “How can we use assessments to help students improve?” If we incentivize success on the first assessment by planning enticing enrichment activities and guide students in correcting the learning errors identified on that assessment, we’re much more likely to realize Benjamin Bloom’s dream of having all students, ALL students learn well.
To bring improvement, Bloom stressed formative assessments must be followed by high-quality, corrective instruction designed to remedy whatever learning errors the assessments identified. Unlike reteaching, which typically involves simply repeating the original instruction, correctives present concepts in new ways and engage students in different learning experiences.
He explains that concerns about time and coverage can be overcome by using a corrective process, that this is what real life is like (i.e. surgeon, pilot), and the everyday reality of mastery and fair grades (i.e driver’s license.)
I guess it raises the question, what is the point of feedback, if students are not given the opportunity to act upon it?
While you’ve lost what is great about face to face teaching, you have also been unshackled by its slavish adherence to the clock. You are now master of your time, and you can use it to gather as much feedback as you like, however you like.
Stumbled on this video in the link below with Brené Brown explaining her approach to sharing ideas and critique to a room of designers.
Her comments about the people and critique we should choose to pay attention to, really resonated with me. To use her language, unless you are doing the work, in the arena with me, I am not interested in your critique.
Regular Radical Readers know that the joy of my life is my ten year old daughter, Reece. She’s something else, that’s for sure. But check out her bedroom this morning: If you were to g…
Greg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)I like having personal conversations with students and developing TAGs-Targeted Areas of Growth. What are the one or two criterion a student should focus on when improving writing. Never try to get an 8 year old writer to adresss six different indicators of quaility at once. I don’t think adult writers should undertake such an endeavor.
So, by the end of that Friday afternoon, I had 30 comparative paragraphs to mark. Lucky me! Well, it was lucky for me that I had used a bit of a mastery learning process and taught the kids my coding system because it meant giving feedback would be super efficient! Below is a brief summary of my process (as I posted it to Twitter on Sunday).
Quality feedback is timely, tied to a goal, and results in improvement. Strong feedback is actionable and answers three questions: What am I trying to achieve? How much progress have I made so far? What should I do next?
Despite the best intentions of the feedback provider, their high skill levels and even high quality – unless the receiver is ready to receive, it does not matter. Mitigate this by using some of these practical strategies and considering how we might increase the capacity, readiness and disposition of receiving feedback.
Annual assessments can be wildly inaccurate — not to mention soul-crushing. Here’s why the ritual, dreaded by managers and the managed alike, falls short, and what might work better.
All too often, Aguinis says, formal performance reviews become a self-serving exercise in politics, not a realistic examination of an employee’s strengths and weaknesses. “Some managers will give biased ratings on purpose,” he says. “I have personally seen a supervisor giving a bad employee a good rating just so that employee could get promoted out of his unit.”
The answer is not to remove reviews, by instead make them more regular, therefore making the feedback more meaningful:
To really understand the value of their employees, Aguinis says, managers should double down on the practice of everyday management. That means checking in on employees every day and giving them real-time feedback on things they’re doing well and areas where they can improve. “When performance is a conversation, when it’s not something that happens just once a year, the measurement becomes very easy and straightforward with no surprises,” he says. He adds that it’s important to gather input from many different people within the system – peers as well as supervisors. “The best source of data is often not the manager,” he says.
This is another interesting post which captures some of the problems with feedback and the challenges of self-determined learning in a world ruled by numbers.
We humans do not do well when someone whose intentions are unclear tells us where we stand, how good we “really” are, and what we must do to fix ourselves. We excel only when people who know us and care about us tell us what they experience and what they feel, and in particular when they see something within us that really works.
Focusing people on their shortcomings doesn’t enable learning; it impairs it.
Buckingham and Goodall highlight three theories that those who believe in feedback as often accepts as true:
In response, they propose a number of strategies to support the development of others, including:
This is something I have written about too, discussing the problem of feedback.
How the suggestion box, once a simple tool for giving feedback, played a role in the weirder and darker data-hungry present for many companies.
Companies and apps constantly ask for ratings, but all that data may just be noise in the system.
Traceable to antiquity, the idea of feedback roared to prominence in the 18th century when the Scottish engineer James Watt figured out how to harness the mighty but irregular power of steam. Watt’s steam governor solved the problem of wasted fuel by feeding the machine’s speed back into the apparatus to control it. When the machine ran too fast, the governor reduced the amount of steam fed to the engine. And when it slowed down, the governor could increase the flow of steam to keep the machine’s speed steady. The steam governor drove the Industrial Revolution by making steam power newly efficient and much more potent. Because it could maintain a relatively stable speed, Watt’s steam engine used up to one-third less energy than previous steam-powered engines.
Wiener broadened the definition of feedback, seeing it as a generic “method of controlling a system” by using past results to affect future performance. Any loop that connects past failures and successes to the present performance promises an improved future. But instead of energy, Wiener thought of feedback in terms of information. No matter the machine, Wiener hypothesized, it took in “information from the outer world” and, “through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus,” made information useful. Water flow, engine speed, temperature—all become information.
Positive ratings are a kind of holy grail on sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, and negative reviews can sink a burgeoning small business or mom-and-pop restaurant. That shift has created a misunderstanding about how feedback works. The original structure of the loop’s information regulation has been lost.
Feedback may matter to the corporations that solicit it, but the nature of the feedback itself—the people who provide it, the relevance of their opinions, and the quality of the information—seems not to matter at all.
