A Better Form of Feedback

Using workshops to work better

From Gunshow, a webcomic by KC Green.

Note: This is an updated and partially rewritten version of an essay originally published on January 8, 2016.

On January 4th of 2016, I posted “Directional Discomfort,” part of that school year’s collection of flipped lectures:

Directional Discomfort | English 11

Even then, the most important part of the post is what students had to say in the comment section. Consider the following comment:

[A]nother problem [students] have is finding an opportunity to get feedback from Mr. Eure individually… With so many students in each class and only 39 minutes, it’s understandable that not everyone will get the chance. Even during my free periods there’s always a waiting line to talk one-on-one with him, so it’s hard…

[I]t seems as if the feedback we receive is insufficient at times. The only time we get good constructive feedback is when we approach Mr. Eure directly, which relies on student initiative and the teacher having time to listen. Sometimes student feedback can be contradictory because one person may like what you write, and another student may not, and you’re not really sure who to listen to. I personally prefer advice from Mr. Eure, but even without him, the course is self-driven so we all have to try and work things out ourselves.

This is excellent feedback, and not just in content. It is written down, which gives it weight and permanence. It is posted publicly, which gives other students — even current students who follow in her footsteps — a chance to interact with her and add their thoughts.

My response to this comment grew in the writing, eventually turning into this essay. That move is, by itself, part of the desired feedback loop: A student uses the comment section of Sisyphean High to communicate a concern; I answer that concern directly, even if it takes a few days (and a lot of writing); students engage with and respond to that instruction; and so on.

In light of that student’s comment and the need to clarify how feedback works in our classroom, there are three concerns:

1. Student initiative
2. Teacher availability
3. Quality of peer feedback

On Student Initiative

The first concern is easy enough to address: Yes, students are responsible for their learning in this course. They must take the initiative. This essay offers one perspective on that responsibility:

Head Training: The 36th Chamber

And I’ve just transcribed a speech given to students last year:

Directional Discomfort

That one is more negative than I’ve become in my old age (two babies will age a man quickly), but the central idea still works: Students need to take responsibility for how they spend their time.

On Teacher Availability and the Quality of Peer Feedback

We should consider the second and third concern together. To talk about teacher availability and the quality of peer feedback, however, we need to revisit how individual assignments function in a grade-abated course.

Let’s start with a proverb attributed to Caius Titus:

Verba volant, scripta manent.

Translated, it says, “Words fly away; writings remain.” This the heart of our desired feedback loop: The written word makes formal agreement easier.

And it might help to use “agreement” in place of “feedback.” Feedback needs to be ameliorative — an agreement about what we need to improve or repeat moving forward. Since feedback in this course is based on universal languages for writing and learning, we can be most rational and helpful by centralizing written feedback that actually employs those languages.

A reliance on the written word also lets us invoke Orwell:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

Those questions inform the posts I write through Medium and Sisyphean High. I often answer the penultimate one (“Could I put it more shortly?”) by, you know, writing an extra thousand words, but the length of the writing is deliberate. These instructional texts are meant to challenge a student’s close reading skills — not because of obtuse or obfuscating writing, but because it strengthens the mind to learn the definition of “obtuse” and “obfuscating.”

That explicitly does not address individual progress, however. Individual progress is shaped differently in this course. In 2015, to explain this, I wrote the following:

GAPs in Herd Immunity

The part of this essay that is most interesting now is the breadth and depth of data transcribed in those GAP spreadsheets. It felt necessary to compile that much about each of you, just like it once felt necessary to spend 45 minutes annotating each student’s essay with enough red ink to recreate a murder scene. I imagine that any student would like to know what observations a teacher makes on a daily basis, what might be written on an essay, what grade might be earned in a traditional course…

But that wouldn’t help. A teacher-driven and teacher-dependent system has no long-term efficacy. It grinds the learning process to a halt and glosses over individual needs. It will not last beyond this year, because I don’t travel with my students. So the takeaway from “GAPs in Herd Immunity” is that we are responsible to each other — that we can collaborate to produce more effective feedback than one teacher ever could.

Notice that the pronoun in those last sentences is “we.” Expertise is required to give feedback that is accurate and ameliorative, and while the expert may occasionally be a former student or peer, it’s more likely to be the teacher. We can’t adopt the wilderness mentality that is used in some forms of inquiry-based instruction — the idea that you can be thrust without foundations into a makerspace.

More from Gunshow.

It’s true that you can teach yourself many things, and active learning is more permanent than passive regurgitation. That is only possible with the right skills and traits firmly embedded, however, and an expert has to identify when that foundational work is done.

The solution to the problem of time and access is to employ radial and proxy feedback within what is called an atelier workshop. This is a kind of makerspace that places an expert at the center of creative and divergent work, rather than expecting all members to have equal background and training.

In an atelier, the expert — again, usually the teacher — generates the feedback loop:

1. He collaborates with a group to refine skills or understanding;
2. that group writes metacognitively to crystallize their learning; and then
3. they teach others as a proxy for the expert.

In an atelier model, there will quickly be more experts than just the teacher in the room. (The makerspace terminology for these proxy teachers is apprentice or journeyman, but I’m sure we can come up with something better.) Whenever possible, these experts utilize the interstitial structures of the course to freeze the proxy teaching in writing, which broadens its scope and potential impact.

As an imperative checklist:

1. Complete the initial assignment.
2. Seek radial feedback from the teacher.
3. Write metacognitively to refine understanding.
4. Teach others as a proxy.
5. Share the work — all four previous steps — interstitially and in writing.

While all of Sisyphean High units use this approach, the following one was built to accompany this Medium essay in its original form:

If You See It in the Sun | English 11

Caveat: The Woods for the Trees

Even more Gunshow — for consistency’s sake, if nothing else.

Radial feedback is critical, but there are times when I need to meet with a single student for an entire period. It might feel unfair, like one person has monopolized the teacher’s expertise, but this is actually the crux of proxy feedback: empowering one student to teach many.

Speaking of “unfair”: Click here to read a post from April 10, 2014, when a much grumpier version of me took on the idea of unfairness.

That only works if I can trust the rest of the class to do its job. If I must stand next to you to insure your productivity, you prevent the radial/proxy circuit from activating. The feedback loop is broken, and my energy is redirected toward babysitting and a series of increasingly loud sighs.

We talk often about working hard, and some of you have increased your in-class focus as a result of those talks. There are other ways to be unproductive, however, and we should briefly discuss one: the tendency to miss the forest for the trees.

Here are two examples from January of 2016, with notes on the context to help current and future students:

Grade-Abated Test Prep

Directional Discomfort

The first post should was used to set up the second. By Friday, January 8, 2016, the students in the course should have been well into the second post.

That second post, uploaded on Monday, January 4, gave students a checklist. They were reminded to focus on a set of Orwell-inspired responses. They were reminded to finish reading a series of essays and articles by Friday, January 8, 2016, which was nearly three weeks after that series of essays was assigned. They were reminded of the power of the interstitial aspects of the course and the need for systemic commitment.

What happened? First, a staggering number of students spent three days watching the entire episode of Press Your Luck that inspired this Medium essay:

Press Your Luck

There is no reason to watch the entire episode. I use the term “Larsoning” as a metaphor for one-half of our test-driven preparations — the gamesmanship half — but the entire episode does not deepen nor clarify that metaphor. It might be interesting in a general sense, but watching it in class wasted time that should have been dedicated to more meaningful work.

Second, an equally staggering number of students chose, out of many meaningful assignments, the one that no longer offered much help: an essay that was due the previous Sunday.

That original deadline, which was set nearly a month earlier, would have allowed us to use the week to workshop student writing. Slogging through a first draft well after the deadline only caused students to fall further behind, to say nothing of how little we learn from a rushed essay.

So I started over on Monday, January 11, with a slow-burn focus on ETA prompts and the radial-to-proxy feedback loop. The relevant instructional post was followed by a new essay prompt:

The Worst Lie You’ve Ever Told | English 11

The point of recounting this is a simple series of imperatives:

• Do not be consumed by distraction or minutiae.
• Focus on the process and the product equally.
• Use the classroom, including the interstitial one.
• Gather your resources.
• Collaborate with each other.
• Trust the system.