Not All Feedback is Created Equal
There’s a seriously dangerous kind of feedback that I’ve just been reminded of.
I’m currently enrolled at the University of Phoenix against my will. I feel shanghaied by the pedagogical silliness that this kind of environment creates, but, if I want to continue to teach math in Iowa, I suppose it must be so.
No, not this kind of awsome world-eating phoenix. The other, online type...
I found myself waiting for feedback from my “professor.” Not so that I can get better, but to find out if she’s going to award me enough points so that I can be done with the class for good. I was sincerely willing to edit my academic behavior based on her feedback. Sincerely, in a most insincere way.
This is the worst kind of feedback I can imagine, and I realized that it represents almost the sum total of feedback interactions most students experience–which sucks, royally.
What if this is what students are really thinking, “I hope he likes the drivel I just submitted, if not, I hope he tells me exactly what flavor of drivel he prefers so I can be done.” It’s a really hard line to find, because I bet that I look engaged in this class, but it really is for the absolute wrong reasons.
The BlueHarvest experiment I’ve been running this semester, I hope, has been richer than this, but there’ll be more on that in the coming weeks.
My job has been to help students generate projects that climb the cognitive ladder. However, I’ve seen remnants of UoPh-isms in my kids, and it has got me down.
A lot of students will request a conference with me so that they can spout back the wikipedia. A good place to start, I say, but how are you going to connect this to your life so that you’ll truly remember it. There’s a lot of blank stares that go with that question. Um, I mean, I know what an intron is, won’t you check that off then? No, child, why do they matter, and how can you show it to a 7th grader?
Hands down this has been the hardest semester of my life, because every student needs this kind of surgical attention on nearly every standard. My count to date is pushing 2,500 individual conferences with students recorded into BlueHarvest.
Yeah, I’ll have a beer.
The worst part is, I’m not sure they got the deep lab experience I was hoping for. Sure, a few students chose to design laboratory experiments to demonstrate their understanding, but most went the poster-presentation-movie-ppt route. Not bad, but much too academic for a lab course. Pero, que sera, sera, no?
Again, here are the hallmarks of a student who has passed the Cornally FeedThresh:
- The student knows that first attempts are rarely perfect, and often require serious revising.
- The student wants expert feedback on work that is established and based on research and the literature.
- The student knows that his learning is not tied to class time or any other arbitrary unit of time or space.
So Many Golf Balls Summer Programming!
I think it is great that you are doing this. What I have learned with my college students is that they have no clue as to what I am trying to do. It is a lot of hard work, but my goal is for them to learn, not regurgitate. How successful I am, I have no clue. To reduce the stress on me, I tell them that the first return I will tell that it is not up to par and leave it up to them to see if they can find out what is wrong. Then I can see what they change and start to see what they are thinking. I will say that what I notice is in college my class sizes can shrink really fast because it places a lot of stress on them. I need to figure out what to do about that.
Keep up the good work. If you need anything, I am just right down the road.
It takes a lot of time to give quality feedback. It would be great if we could give every kid hours and hours of individual time every grading period, but unless we plan to overwork ourselves and forfeit life outside of our job, I’m not sure what your doing is sustainable.
So really, we have a quest for balance through efficiency. I have taken a look at Blue Harvest and am considering using it. I am also very much considering moving much of my retesting (and “up-testing”) online to Moodle. Although generic, Moodle allows us to give feedback for both correct and common incorrect answers. Obviously specific individual feedback would be optimal, but I am not convinced I have time to do that for all kids within all learning targets.
Do you think you can continue to do what you are doing for years without burning yourself out?
I’ve tutored for U of P. You have my sympathy.
Isn’t there anywhere else you can take classes? Local? Commuting distance? Distance learning from a brick-and-mortar school?
Timely. I just finish giving extensive feedback in an online graduate course. We spend a lot of time asking people to reflect, including reflecting on our feedback and how it makes them learn. I sometimes paranoidly imagine that they are thinking, “how do I write that I learned from waiting for him to approve my drivel in a way that he ultimately approves and passes me?”
I think a lot of my fear of drivel has to do with the fact that I tell them what to do all semester long — there’s no “show me that you know how to ask everyone around you great questions, somehow,” it’s all, “ask your peer a great question NOW!” “NOW, go ask your students a great question.” Even though asking good questions is an authentic and important task, it’s hard (especially in an online course) to figure how to make #3 (The student knows that his learning is not tied to class time or any other arbitrary unit of time or space) happen. Oh, and how to make #1 happen since the questions they’re asking of each other and their students are both live and they get to revise them…
Thanks for the space to reflect and vent.