Designing Feedback Activities

The intersection between reflection, making and assessment

I have written before about the transformative experience of spending time in a design school that dismissed grades as counterproductive to a collaborative learning environment. This post narrates how that experience forever shaped the design teacher I became.

The educational culture of my undergrad experience was defined by an implicit agenda to please the professor, to get an A. My studio professor once began the school year by saying if anyone wanted feedback from the year before he’d be in his office. Since all we’d got was a single letter grade as the sum evaluation for a year-long course I was intensely curious to know what he saw in my work. My peers and I were oblivious as to why I got the single coveted A he handed out — so I walked straight into his office. I left one minute later still clueless, as he dismissed me with the argument that feedback was for people struggling. The fact I was struggling to make sense of my grade was irrelevant. A few weeks later he told the class why my work that didn’t “look” the best was strong but he chose to say this when I wasn’t there. You can see how this experience primed me to be super impressed by the self-reliant philosophy of teaching I came across in India. Just as the experience in the total immersion class reinforced the role of peer community in advancing each others learning.

So I became the teacher that championed self and peer assessment. For decades I have experimented with different multi-modal ways to foster a students self-awareness and build critical capacity to offer meaningful feedback to each other. We sketch what bad collaboration looks like:

We create reflection boxes that focus on what we feel and commit to applying one idea next week in class.

And we work on growth mindset. Especially trying to track our experience of working on a project over time. Paying attention to how oftentimes getting up from when we have stumbled is when a real learning opportunity comes along.

These are just a few ways I use formative feedback as a form of self and peer assessment in higher education. Still, I oftentimes question the extent to which my commitment to student-led learning has over-corrected. The focus on finding engaging ways to reflect is the upside. The downside is that I have failed to develop interesting strategies for the teacher to give formative feedback.

This semester my students and I are working together on how to find the sweet spot between my original belief that they need to be self-reliant and not depend on me to a student feeling left alone in the woods with no map. I teach design students, so I really need them to tolerate uncertainty, take risks, learn from doing. So I never wanted to give them a set of directions, a single way out. But now I have thought it through it’s obvious I should have had the least given them a compass.