Radial and Proxy Teaching
Feedback loops in a grade-abated classroom
The comment section of the January 4th post, “Directional Discomfort,” needs your attention. There are only four comments, so it won’t take you long to read; you’ll see, however, what thoughtful and useful student feedback looks like.
Feedback must be a loop. When you talk to me, I can talk to you; otherwise, these interstitial moments are less effective, and the class overall helps you less. You must leave comments. You must share your concerns. You must take responsibility for your role in the feedback loop.
Consider, from that January 4th post, 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 from a student to me. It is written down, which gives it weight and permanence. It is posted publicly, which gives her peers a chance to interact with her and add their thoughts.
My response to this comment grew in the writing, so it has been moved here. 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.
On the subject of feedback, there are three concerns to address:
- Student initiative
- Teacher availability
- Quality of peer feedback
The first is easy enough: Yes, you are responsible for your learning in this course. You must take the initiative. Two upcoming essays (“Head Training: 36 Chambers” and “The Gift Outright”) will develop this idea by explicating the interstitial requirements of your progress and the importance of communication.
To talk about teacher availability and the quality of peer feedback, we need to revisit how individual assignments function in a grade-abated course.
Verba volant, scripta manent: Words fly away; writings remain.
That bit of Latin is a proverb attributed to Caius Titus, and its suggestion is the heart of our desired feedback loop: The written word makes formal agreement easier. Feedback needs to be ameliorative — an agreement about what we need to improve or repeat moving forward. That feedback is based on our universal languages for writing and learning, and we can be most rational and helpful by centralizing written feedback that uses 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 written to you through these interstitial forums. I often answer the penultimate one (“Could I put it more shortly?”) by, you know, writing an extra thousand words, but the length of these posts is deliberate. These instructional texts are meant to challenge your close reading skills — not because of obtuse or obfuscating writing, but because it strengthens your 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:
The part of this essay that is most interesting now, a year later, is the breadth and depth of data transcribed in those GAP spreadsheets. It feels 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 you, too, would like to know what observations I make about you on a daily basis, what I might write on your essay, what grade you might receive 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 you. 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.” You need expertise to insure that the feedback you receive is accurate and ameliorative, and while the expert may occasionally be a former student or peer, it’s more likely to be me. We don’t have 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.
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 you need an expert to tell you when that foundational work is done.
The solution to the problem of time and access is to employ radial and proxy feedback. Your expert — again, usually your teacher — collaborates with a group to refine skills or understanding; that group writes metacognitively to crystallize their learning; then they teach others as a proxy for the expert. Whenever possible, we 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:
- Complete the initial assignment.
- Seek radial feedback from the teacher.
- Write metacognitively to refine understanding.
- Teach others as a proxy.
- Share the work — all four previous steps — interstitially and in writing.
While all of our units use this approach, the following one was built to accompany this Medium essay:
Caveat: The Forest for the Trees
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 each many.
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 disappointed sighs.
We’ve talked a lot this year 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.
Consider two recent posts:
The first should have taught you what it has to teach you a while ago. By Friday, January 8, you should have been well into the second one.
That second post, uploaded on Monday, January 4, gave you a checklist. You were reminded to focus on your Orwell-inspired responses. You were reminded to finish reading a series of essays and articles by Friday, January 8, which would be nearly three weeks after that series of essays was assigned. You were reminded of the power of the interstitial aspects of the course and the need for systemic commitment.
Yet a number of you spent three days watching the entire episode of Press Your Luck from this Medium essay:
There is no reason to watch the entire episode. We’re adopting “Larsoning” as a metaphor for how we’ll approach one-half of our test-driven preparations — the gamesmanship half — and the entire episode does not deepen or clarify that metaphor. You wasted time that should have been dedicated to more meaningful work.
Of those meaningful assignments, a number of you chose the one that no longer helps you: the essay that was due the previous Sunday, January 3. That original deadline, which was set nearly a month earlier, would have allowed us to use the week to workshop your writing. Slogging through a first draft well after the deadline only caused you to fall further behind, to say nothing of how little we learn from a rushed essay.
That’s why we 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 has now been followed by a new essay prompt:
Do not be consumed by distraction or minutiae this time. Focus on the process and the product. Use the classroom, including the interstitial one. Gather your resources, collaborate with each other, and trust the system.
