The importance of feedback
This week I have been inspired by some talks I heard.
The first was Robert Steven Kaplan in a Leaders@Google talk here. He was talking about leadership in business, but I got two good ideas in that talk which I can apply to my work. The first was that there should be an agreement about a vision of what you want to do. The second was identifying three key domains which were necessary to achieve the vision.
I know. It’s all a bit new-age sounding, or corporate BS sounding. But I did stop for a moment and think about what are the three areas I need to think about as a teacher.
I came up with “delivery, organisation and assessment and feedback”. When I revisited it a little while later, I noticed the assumptions embedded in the first of those, delivery. So I changed it to “facilitation”. My goal is to move my teaching in that direction.
This thinking about higher goals and objectives coupled with listening to the audiobook of Robert Maurer’s One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way. lead me to start asking the question: What is one small, trivial thing I could do to improve in one of these areas? The area that I settled on was feedback (ει¦).
If I’m going to move my teaching to a more constructivist style, I need to know more about my students’ experiences and desires. I want to do this with a minimal amount of fuss, both for the students and me. I set up a one-question survey on my school’s portal. Students are asked what they would like to learn more about.
I was so tempted to add more questions, but I won’t until the students are used to regularly answering the one question. I really like the idea of small ideas and small questions. It seems to be pretty powerful stuff. I think I’ve been looking for the One Big Answer to all of it, whereas there are lots of small questions that can change behaviour.
You can help me too with your feedback on feedback. π
mailaoshi 
Hi Mailaoshi, are you teaching high school students? I like to take a constructivist approach because of my personalities and beliefs. In class, I found many factors come into place when giving feedback to high school students. For example, some students are very sensitive to any public comments. Some boys will get too cocky if I tell them they are good. Because I am using Moodle, I often give online private/public feedback but I realise that I need to train my students to read it because many students think that they have done their jobs once they click “submit” / “post”.
If it’s only one question, how about using twitter? I think I’ll try this with my kids since many of them have smart phones.