How do you ensure your students are reading your feedback, digesting it, and using it to improve? Alexis Wiggins explores the connections between reflection and feedback. She shares her personal experiences around revision-based assessments, AI possibilities, and modeling her use of feedback from student surveys.
Read Alexis’ article, “Feedback That Matters” here.
Watch the “Austin’s Butterfly” video here.
Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!
Podcast Transcript:
[00:00:00.000] – Steve [Intro]
Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.
[00:00:25.920] – Steve
Make Making Feedback Matter. I’m excited to have Alexis Wiggins returning to our podcast. Alexis is the head of the Upper School at the John Cooper School in Woodlands, Texas. She is also the Director of Teaching and Learning. Alexis has worked as a teacher, coach, consultant, and administrator in the United States, Spain, the Middle East, and Asia. On a previous podcast, Alexis shared the value of student-led discussions to develop student skills in analytical thinking, complex problem solving, reasoning, and ideation. I reached out to invite Alexis back when I read a piece that she had written for ASCD titled, “Feedback That Matters.” Alexis, thanks so much for returning.
[00:01:20.860] – Alexis
It’s my pleasure.
[00:01:22.760] – Steve
Your article began talking about the importance of feedback and reflection for learning. I wondered if you talk a little bit about the connection of those two, because the more I’ve explored this, the more I’ve recognized the value of the two of those coming together.
[00:01:42.460] – Alexis
Yeah. Thank you for that wonderful question. And thank you for having me back, Steve. It’s great to be here. I think feedback is such a broad term that we use it, I think, so often without fully understanding what we mean by it and how students take it. And I’m always reminded of an interesting story my Dad, Grant Wiggins, would tell in some of his workshops where he described a student receiving papers all year from his teacher, and at the end of the year, thanking his teacher for a wonderful class and just saying, “I never understood this thing you always used to write on my paper, ‘Vagu.'”
[00:02:24.670] – Steve
[laughter]
[00:02:25.020] – Alexis
And it’s such a great story because it illustrates that even the best, most well-intentioned, experienced teachers assume that when we give feedback, students understand it and they know how to use it. I think feedback and reflection have to go together. And we should never assume that when we give feedback to students, that it’s actually understood or interpreted the way we intended. So to me, the importance of feedback isn’t just giving of it, it’s the using of it. Are you giving students opportunities to take your feedback, reflect on it themselves, perhaps reflect on it in written format or a conversation with you or a peer, or a parent, depending on the situation, and then apply it again and follow up with questions so that it’s not just I’m giving, a student is receiving, and then they’re hopefully applying, but it’s this ongoing give and take.
[00:03:30.320] – Alexis
I think that the reflection and the feedback have to be woven together to actually have most students, except the rare exceptions, be able to apply it and learn from it and grow. And I think adults work this way, too. If you think about any feedback you’ve ever received in your job or in a hobby, let’s just say I took some tennis lessons as an adult a couple of years ago. I’m constantly trying to take the feedback the coach is giving me and apply it, but I’m not getting it right much of the time. So I have to ask questions. I have to say, “is it like this?” And he has to correct me, and then he has to come closer and show me, and then he models it. So I think it’s always that give and take. And I think without offering very specific scaffolded, scheduled opportunities, not only to just write down feedback, but actually have students internalize it and repeat it back to you, there isn’t going to be enough of reflection for most kids to actually make a difference in their growth.
[00:04:32.920] – Steve
I’m almost hearing that the teacher needs feedback on their feedback from the student.
[00:04:41.160] – Alexis
That’s a great notion. I like that. I like the idea of receiving feedback on the feedback from the student. But a pivotal mentor for me in reading – I’ve met him and gotten to go to his workshops, but specifically, his book on formative assessment, Dylan William, he talked about the things that empirically make a difference in feedback. And one of them, feedback should be timely, actionable. There are some very key things he outlines in his book, and those two are the ones that I really focus on in my teaching – that they’re getting feedback quickly enough that it makes sense to the activity that’s just been done, whether it’s writing or speaking, and that it’s actionable. What can they do with it right now? And that’s how I developed a revision-based system so that students could act on that feedback, not have to wait for an assessment three weeks or even three months down the line to apply it. Timely and actionable. So if I’m giving feedback, they should be able to use it right away to apply it again. Otherwise, it’s not very helpful. If I had a tennis lesson every three months, it wouldn’t go very well.
[00:06:02.600] – Steve
There’s another quote from your Dad, Grant Wiggins, that I pulled that I wanted to ask you to respond to. He had stated, “As we have seen, research shows that less teaching plus more feedback is the key to achieving greater learning.”
[00:06:22.720] – Alexis
Yeah, that resonates with me. Guilty as charged, I’m a person who loves to talk, and I love to chat with my students, and I love to get up there and be the sage on the stage. I think students often really enjoy that. No one wants to have someone droning away in a boring manner, but there are wonderful lecturers and engaging teachers. As an upper school head or high school principal, as some people call it, I get to see so many wonderful styles of teaching now. There’s nothing wrong with that style of teaching. But I have had to learn to almost physically restrain myself from as much talking in class and shift the model a little bit to more what my dad and Jay in, “Understanding by Design” would call “meaning making.” I think, yes, of course, if you lecture, direct instruct or model, those are really vital parts of learning. But then, almost in my mind, at least half, if not two-thirds of a lesson or a unit should then be students actually making meaning with what you’ve been talking about or talking to them about. Because without that, they actually don’t internalize it, and then they won’t be able to do it.
[00:07:49.840] – Alexis
So let’s just take writing as an example. I might lead my students through an outlining process for a timed essay for an AP course, let’s say. I taught AP literature a few years ago, and they’re generally pretty capable students who are seniors. So it goes pretty quickly. It’s not beginning writing, but you still have to say, this is a model that’s going to bring you success on the exam and also going to teach you how to organize your thoughts in a very short time period and focus on what’s most essential. And I might walk them through that and scaffold it and give them some guide. But then in class, I will have a timed essay, and we will all write on a prompt, and I will write it with them. I will model that because number one, I want to know what their stress is, and I feel it. I watch the clock ticking, and I start feeling stressed. And I have a master’s degree in literature. So that’s good practice. And then I try to write it at a level that’s very high for their ability, but not like grad school. I try to write it at a level they can understand, show them the vocabulary that they have access to that they could actually use, but not use vocabulary that they wouldn’t know, for example.
[00:09:10.780] – Alexis
And then we go around and they would read mine and then reread theirs. I would say, “What am I doing that you aren’t yet?” And so they go back to the rubric and they look at the rubric, and they start to be able to identify for themselves like, oh, wow, your diction is so much stronger than mine. Okay, well, that’s normal. I’m older, I’m experienced, I have more degrees than you. But what could you do specifically to raise your diction in the next one? Now write that down, reflect on that. So then they would write three goals at the bottom of their formative essay for the next time. And that might be one lesson. We have 80 minutes blocks where we are. So we might do the 40 minute writing and then reflect in the second half. But if you have shorter blocks, you would do the writing one block, and then the next class you meet, do that reflective piece where they’re reading mine and reflecting on it and talking with each other. So that’s a long way of saying there’s so many ways to give feedback that aren’t just grading. I think modeling is a feedback, discussing is a feedback one-on-one with a student, as well as giving them opportunities to reflect.
[00:10:22.400] – Steve
I’m almost hearing the way you describe that, creating an opportunity for the student to create their feedback.
[00:10:28.840] – Alexis
Say more about that.
[00:10:30.000] – Steve
Yeah. They’re comparing their work to the model or to the rubric. They’re pulling some meaning out of that. Then I think I heard you say they’re then taking a next step, which is planning what they would do with the meaning that they pulled out of it.
[00:10:48.720] – Alexis
And that’s that actionable piece. What’s next? How can I apply this directly next time? So we might not write an essay again for a couple of weeks, but I would have them pull out that old essay, and I would have them have access to it when we write the next one. What do they want to remember? I don’t need them to memorize that in a stressful moment. Oh, I need to remember to raise my diction level and to get to my point a little bit more quickly. Alright. Well, good. Have access to those feedback notes that you wrote for yourself last time. And then I think that is also important. I’m sure most of your listeners have heard of John Hattie, but if not, they should put him on the reading list. I think one of the interesting about his metadata, as I understand it, I’m not an expert, but it is that one of the principle indicators of success in students is the ability to self-assess accurately. If I’m just assessing the rubric, giving the feedback, giving a grade, and then keep trying, keep trying, even through conversations, I’m not really setting themselves up for success beyond my class or maybe even in my class.
[00:12:00.000] – Alexis
If I can get them to deepen their understanding of how to self-assess accurately. The hardest thing as a teacher is when you have a student who thinks they’ve nailed it and they’ve totally missed the mark. Those are the most painful, I think, cases to work with. But over time, I think there are ways to help those kids grow and be better self-assessors. But that, to me, is also a really big goal. Sorry, I keep referring back to my Dad, but of course, he was such a mentor to me. He talked about a shop class, a wood shop or metal shop class he visited years ago in a public school. He always used this example as a fabulous example of what good teaching is. He watched a student weld something and then come up to the table where the teacher had left a model, and the student looked at the model and examined it, looked at his own, and went, “Hmm.” And then went back to go fix his. And he said, that’s really the work we need to bring into every subject. So students have the ability to assess against models of all abilities.
[00:13:11.420] – Alexis
I like to have my students looking at examples of essays, not even just in AP. I only taught AP a short time. But in ninth grade English classes, give them… Now with AI, it’s so easy to give them fake models. I used to try to save models, take the names off of them, and I always had a folder of those. Now you can just have ChatGPT generate exactly the model you want. It’s terrific for that. Then you lay out three models and you have the students assess what they think the score would be. I guess I’m talking now about assessment, but I think feedback should be embedded in all of that. Reflection and feedback are inherently tied to assessment. I think we’re missing the mark in if we don’t think of it all as part of the learning.
[00:14:03.980] – Steve
In your article, you talked about revision-based assessment as a way for kids to get stronger at using feedback. Take us a little bit deeper with that.
[00:14:17.640] – Alexis
Yeah. The very short version of this is about 20 years ago now, my goodness. I was at an independent school in New York, and I had heard about a college professor who no longer put grades on papers. He just put publishable or not yet publishable. And then students could self-assess in his college writing class and keep trying until they reached publishable. And at the end of the semester, if they had four publishables, they had an A, and if they had three and one not yet publishable, they had a B or whatever the grade scale was at that college. And I thought that’s really interesting. I’d like to try something like that because I was just tired of a mean average for writing, which is such an iterative process. I had worked for a short time as an intern and briefly in the editing world, and it just didn’t – the work that I was… The structure in most schools is not mirroring the real world. I heard more recently David Sedaris talk on a TED Talk or something about his 12th drafts of an essay for the New Yorker. I thought, David Sedaris is doing 12 drafts?
[00:15:34.580] – Alexis
It’s real writing. We ask students to churn it out once, maybe revise it once. Anyway, long story short, I revised this process over many, many years. And now at my current school, we got to a place where our entire ninth through 12th grade English department uses what we call revision-based assessment. Now, let’s talk pre-AI. Pre-AI, we would have students be able to revise draughts at home as much as they wanted to and get closer through feedback, office hours, peer tutors, whatever methods we had available to them, we would allow them to use for a revision-based assessment and then revise up to the publishable. Now with AI, we’ve had to adjust a little bit, and I’m really sympathetic. It’s a challenge right now when the bot can do the work for the kid and the kid is using it to cut corners, and we want to make sure that the feedback is coming from a human and going to a human. Jay McTie talks about a nightmare scenario in which the bot teacher is giving feedback to the bot and it’s just on a doom loop. Now what we’ve done is we have students do a lot of…
[00:16:53.240] – Alexis
The only writing we graded in our department is done in class, but they have multiple attempts, and they can revise with the teacher in office hours and then build those into the next draft in class and things like that. It’s all done in class. It’s a shorter form. I hope someday we’ll have the technology where we want it to be to get back to that longer form take home writing, but this is what we’ve needed to do for now. So, yeah, the revision-based assessment has been a real boon to our department. We’ve seen scores go up. We don’t know if that’s a direct relation, but we have seen it. We don’t know if it’s correlation or causation, but we are seeing that trend since our entire department started using this. We have been tracking data anonymously on all the students. We survey them four times a year in all the ninth through 12th grade English courses to find out how they feel about it. And so I knew they would like the opportunity to keep trying their writing for a higher grade, and we don’t have a mean average, so they can just revise up to publishable.
[00:17:56.500] – Alexis
And if they have four publishables, they have an A by the end of the semester. So we knew they would like the grading aspect of it. But what we didn’t know is that they would talk about how much it has benefited their mental health. Even before COVID, we got this data from students that they were so much less anxious and stressed because if they were having a bad day, if they were having a rough week, if they had been sick, they had time to still show us what they could do by a certain deadline, but not just one particular day. That data is really compelling. We didn’t expect that, and I think that’s one of its biggest selling points for us and the students and the parents. In the beginning, some students got upset that if they could do it right the first time, it wasn’t fair for other students to keep trying. But that’s a sorting model. We want a standards model. If you can reach the standard, we think of athletics. If you can beat a time in track and have the record, it doesn’t really matter whether you did it in the first race or whether you did it in the final race.
[00:19:07.860] – Alexis
It’s reaching the standard.
[00:19:10.420] – Steve
Are you familiar with Ron Berger’s, “Austin’s Butterfly?”
[00:19:15.880] – Alexis
You read my mind because we show that video every year to the students.
[00:19:22.350] – Steve
[laughter] You read my mind because I just listened to people talking about showing it to their high school students.
[00:19:27.900] – Alexis
You’ll have to link the video video for your listeners in the podcast notes. It is a fantastic video. We often show it to parents as well when they ask questions on the vision phase. It is a beautiful illustration for anyone who doesn’t know what you’re talking about, of a journalist talking to students about how they use feedback and young kids, I think they’re second graders, and how to draw a butterfly. And it’s so cute to watch the kids, but we show it to our students every year as a reminder of why revision-based assessment works and why we believe in it for them and why they should hopefully take it seriously. The nice thing about it, too, is that we don’t assume that every kid wants an A. We have some students whose goal is to get a B and to move on. Maybe they have a really hard, hard class that they need to put a lot of other effort into, or they’re a STEM kid, and they just don’t really need the English as much. So So it is nice for them to be able to say, I’m happy with my A minus, and I don’t need to revise anymore.
[00:20:36.220] – Alexis
I’m going to put my effort into my biotest. And we say, great, that’s your choice. Now the choice is yours.
[00:20:42.280] – Steve
So you mentioned AI before, and in your article, you talked about some things you started working with AI for feedback. So what are you finding?
[00:20:54.060] – Alexis
I’m so lucky to work at an incredible school that is, I think, at the forefront of some of this work. And by forefront, I mean we’re all flying blind, right? Because I heard of an employee connected to our school who works for one of the big tech companies and he was saying to a colleague of mine that he gets trained every six months – retrained on everything because it’s moving so fast. So that’s alarming, right? So education is trying to play catch up on a six month cycle, and education doesn’t really work well on that pace. We have things that are established that work well, and it is challenging. So my heart goes out to all the teachers really trying to embrace the good parts of AI, but feeling frustrated with some of it. There’s a few buckets. One is the safety and security bucket, and that’s an important one. My tech colleagues think a lot about that and keep us safe. And then there’s the student use bucket. How are we getting students to use AI in really cool, effective ways that are transforming the work they can do or how they think about things?
[00:22:15.460] – Alexis
And then there’s the teacher bucket. How do we actually get our teachers up to speed on this technology and how to use it? It’s so new. It reminds me of when the Internet came to be when I was in high school. And I remember some early adopter teachers, “the information superhighway.” They were so excited. And it was all this vague concept. I think we had one computer connected to the Internet in the library, and nobody really knew what to do with it. So it’s a similar, but maybe even on a bigger scale change for society. Those three buckets, I let my tech colleagues and supervisors worry the most about safety and security. I’m often thinking the most now as administrator about how to help teachers use this effectively in the classroom and how to help students engage with it effectively. I’m very lucky that this year we have an AI Innovation Coordinator at our school for Pre-K 12. So he’s leading the way now, whereas in the last few years as the Director of Teaching and Learning, I was working on the schools, the AI guidelines for teachers, AI guidelines for students. So doing a lot of research and trying to figure out where we were.
[00:23:29.780] – Alexis
Where we landed was we have a few programs that we use. We settled on Magic School as the best one for safe student use. We tested a lot. I feel really good about Magic School for student use. For teacher use, I think teachers like to use outside ones more often like Claude and perplexity and, of course, ChatGPT. We do have rules as a school about how to use those safely and ethically. We never use student names, for example, in an outside company for all the ethical reasons that we wouldn’t wanted to do that. But it’s interesting this year to listen to our AI coordinator because he has brought up some things that I haven’t even thought about. Initially, last year, I tested what it would look like to grade a student essay in my class and then have them feed that essay to Magic School. I, through that AI coordinator’s help, he actually helped design a whole little program in Magic School. It was so easy to do that I could give the rubric, I could say things like, At our school, we use the Schafer paragraph method. So please, in your feedback, reference those kinds of things.
[00:24:43.220] – Alexis
I could say, This is a first draft. Please don’t focus too much on grammar or spelling. You can give that feedback lightly, but that’s not the focus at this stage. So I could prompt it, like an intern, as they say, to give the students the feedback I wanted them to. I had already graded the paper. I was doing it as a test, and then they fed it into Magic School. What I wanted to know was with the rubric and with my parameters, how did Magic School do? What’s interesting about Magic School, unlike ChatGPT, is that I can see all my students and I can see their conversations with Magic School. I have a record of everything they prompted and everything they received. It’s almost like folders. You can go into each kid’s chat. So it was very interesting. I learned that Magic School is pretty darn good at giving that feedback. In a couple of case, students generally felt like it pretty much almost mirrored to a T what I had said in handwriting on their actual papers. In a few instances, Magic School picked up on things I hadn’t, and that was really interesting.
[00:25:50.780] – Alexis
I think some teachers have seen that, unfortunately, and said, great, I can outsource this work to the bot. Our AI coordinator has been really sounding the alarm on that outside of our school. I think a lot of college professors, they’ve done studies, and they are really abusing this. And so I’m concerned about how feedback is being outsourced. And I don’t think that is the best test case for AI right now. In fact, not at all. I would hesitate to recommend a teacher use it in any way like that. I wanted to test what it looked like but teachers at our school are doing it in the drafting process. Have a conversation with the bot. If here’s my rubric and here’s the assignment, is this thesis I’ve come up with strong, what can I do to make it stronger? And then because in Magic School, we do have the record of that chat, the teacher can see that dialog, go around, help the student have a conversation. I would never use AI at this stage to replace human feedback. I would use it to draft, help, prompt, be a thought partner, and maybe test if it mirrors how well you do feedback.
[00:27:07.870] – Alexis
But I find it concerning that. Like I said, I think more students in college and probably high school are writing papers using AI, and the teachers are giving feedback using AI, and it’s a problem. Who’s learning then? Nobody.
[00:27:22.460] – Steve
I guess the piece there is there’s a way for students to learn how to get feedback.
[00:27:32.140] – Alexis
Yeah, that’s a great point. I have two sons right now in high school, a 10th grader and a 12th grader. I think I read something that stopped me in my tracks, which is this year’s seniors, which includes my son, are the first group of students going off to college next year who’ve never not had AI in high school. I thought, oh, my. That’s a real sea change for us. Are we ready? I’m lucky that at our school, all of our courses and our teachers really focus on citation, academic integrity, using AI and citing it. We’ve really tried to drill this. Of course, you can use these tools. You have to cite it if you are. I think our students are maybe lucky in that smaller group of kids around the world who have a better sense of what’s cheating and what’s not, even if they make those choices. Whereas I think, genuinely, some people are confused. “Oh, if it produced this thing for me, then that’s a paper.” It is true, I think, that you can teach students to use these tools, but you can’t just throw it at them. You have to really intentionally model, show them, remind them of the bumpers and the guideposts and not, for example, citing your sources.
[00:29:00.560] – Alexis
You can’t just have the tool do the work for you. It’s not going to go well, and it’s also going to lead to maybe severe consequences for you in high school or college.
[00:29:13.340] – Steve
The feedback word keeps coming back, but you need to give kids feedback on their use of the AI.
[00:29:20.340] – Alexis
It’s hard. It feels like in many courses, including English language arts, history, art. I mean, art can easily be created or copied or modified now with these tools. What I’m finding is that to make life a little easier on teachers and professors who are wanting great creative assessments and ways to check for understanding, that they’re moving to more performance-based oral presentation-based things. We started that a couple of years ago. We used to have a long research paper, and it was a feature of our 10th grade English experience. And about two years ago, we moved to the same research, but the entire product became a presentation because we just knew we couldn’t vouch for that work at home anymore. And it’s just so confusing a time for kids. What is AI? AI is in everything. I mean, it’s in the the Google document you’re writing in or a Word document. If you have Grammarly, Grammarly can just say, hey, can I help with that? And then just produces an entire essay. I think for a kid growing up, like I was saying, this generation of kids, they haven’t really seen anything else. So they don’t think of Grammarly’s help in rewriting entire paragraphs or producing paragraphs from thin air as cheating.
[00:30:57.860] – Alexis
It’s a very confusing time. So I do think we need to guide students. But how do you build in that time in schedules that are exist? It’s hard. I think our administrators have to really vouch for resources, time, money, training to be able to help schools meet the moment. And like I said before, it’s moving so fast. It is hard. This is the first year I’m not in the classroom in nine years at my school, and I’m very close to teaching still. So I feel a lot of sympathy for teachers who are trying to figure this all out.
[00:31:32.160] – Steve
Well, there was one last topic that was in your article that I just love that I wanted you to talk about, and that is how you got students to give you feedback as a way of modeling the use of feedback.
[00:31:51.000] – Alexis
Yeah. I mean, the quick version of that story is 20 years ago in my first couple of years of teaching, I had always been asked to do course surveys, and students back then just filled them out by hand and turned them in either to the administration or to me. I had good feedback and I felt very good. Then I had a colleague who was more experienced, and she said, oh, I take the kids to the computer lab. I put the questions on the board. I leave the computer lab, and then I have them print them out and put it in a box next to me or something. She did it so they couldn’t figure out who wrote what. But anyway, they put them in a box in the thing. Everything, and then she picked them up. I thought, that’s really interesting. Let me try that. I did the exact same thing back when we had computer labs, and the feedback wasn’t quite as good. I thought, oh, the illusion of good feedback was… And then I had an experience at another school where I was asked to give feedback to the administration, and we were just given sheets to write on.
[00:32:58.500] – Alexis
I realized I wasn’t being as honest because I wondered if they could identify my handwriting. And then I thought, aha, these two experiences together teach me that we need to do feedback authentically. And so from then on, I embraced it. And the piece I added in, now I do a Google form or whatever. But the piece I added that I really like is I share the feedback with the students publicly. So when I have them maybe the next class, I will walk them through what they wrote. And I find that sunlight is the best disinfectant. So if there’s something mildly acerbic or aggressive, the kids will be like, “Who wrote that?” That’s the end of that for the year. So I’ve never had anything too horrible in there after that. But I find that that extra step for me, it shows students that I take their feedback seriously. It’s not just going into the ether and who knows what Ms. Wiggins does with it. So one year, I had students who felt there was not enough grammar in the class. Can you believe that? So they were really vocally complaining about it. And then in the feedback, the data showed that it was just a very small minority of kids who felt that way, that the majority felt there was just enough or too much.
[00:34:27.620] – Alexis
And so I was able to share that data with the class and say, I’m really thankful for you speaking up who don’t feel like we have enough grammar, but actually the class generally feels this way. If you want more supplemental grammar, come to me, I’ll give it to you. That’s just a helpful data point. It can dispel some of the upset that brews. I think it just shows students that you care about what they say. I do take their ideas and feedback seriously. To be honest, I like to do feedback once a quarter. With seniors, by the fourth quarter, I usually don’t have time. They’re getting into testing and things like that. But at least three times a year, if not four times a year, I will survey the students because I want to know what their favorite texts are, their favorite assessments are, their favorite units. Should I do this assessment again next year? I want to know all those things. I really take them seriously. And students have seen that. We’ve taken out books that everybody hated, and and added other things that they suggested. And of course, they always say more food in class is like their suggestion.
[00:35:37.220] – Alexis
But there’s often very valuable pieces of feedback in there. I think that sharing it helps reduce some of the more problematic comments that would arise anyway.
[00:35:52.000] – Steve
I’m almost hearing revision-based when you get it every quarter. You have time to make a revision…
[00:36:02.520] – Alexis
Yeah, that’s a great point. I mean, that’s really, again, timely and actionable. If I’m going to ask for feedback at the end of the year, it’s too late. I should be able to use that feedback in my teaching. I’ve never made that connection, Steve, but that’s a really nice parallel. Yes, the feedback should be timely and actionable for students and also for faculty.
[00:36:25.360] – Steve
Raising that impact in me because I’m doing a series of workshops which happen to be on feedback, but they just gave me the AI summary printout of the feedback that people gave at the end of the first session. I’ve printed it as the first slide in my second session and then point to some very specific changes that I implemented in the second session, as well as positives that they reinforced that I kept. You triggered me to be sure that I was modeling in my workshop on feedback, my own use of feedback.
[00:37:13.840] – Alexis
That’s great. That’s good. Yeah, that’s a good thought. I like that.
[00:37:17.880] – Steve
Well, before we wrap up, any overarching thoughts concerning teachers’ work with feedback?
[00:37:28.100] – Alexis
I would just say, be open to feedback and different kinds of feedback, both the designing of feedback for students and also to yourself, for yourself as a teacher. I think we all deserve the opportunity to grow and get better. I know some teachers are afraid of asking students their opinions. The art of a carefully worded question is something to get right. But I always ask a question. My first question is usually, How do you feel about this course so far?” It’s like, “Great. I love it. I like it. Meh. So, so, or meh. I hate it.” Then if they do a, I hate it, I always ask, “Okay, if you’ve chosen, I hate it, can you give me a little example as to why? Is this course just not your thing? Is it something about the teaching?” Usually, when kids choose that, they’ll say things like, “English just isn’t my thing. I’m a STEM person.” And then that helps me know, okay, now I have someone in my class who’s… It’s almost a personal challenge to see, can I make this engaging for them, even if it’s not their thing? And I know I don’t need to take it personally.
[00:38:51.780] – Alexis
They don’t hate me. They don’t hate all literature. It’s okay if they do. And then my follow-up question after that question is always, whether or not you like the course, “do you feel like you’ve improved?” “Yes, absolutely. Yes, somewhat. A little bit. No, not really.” And I’m always struck by the contrast of those two because almost every single kid says yes, enthusiastically or yes, somewhat. And so then I know, okay, I’m doing okay. So I think the art of the carefully worded question in the feedback you want for yourself should be focused on improvement, but not just feeling good about yourself or feeling bad about yourself. That would be a terrible way to design feedback. I think you should really try to target it to questions that get at, even if a kid doesn’t like the course, have they improved? Well, that, to me, is a success.
[00:39:50.860] – Steve
Well, thank you so much. I’ll put the link to the article that caught my attention in the lead-in to the podcast. If people want to follow up, touch base with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?
[00:40:07.320] – Alexis
Probably my email, awiggins@ceelcenter.org. I’m sure you can put that in the notes as well.
[00:40:17.600] – Steve
I’ll put that in as well. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
[00:40:22.260] – Alexis
Thank you, Steve. It’s a pleasure, as always.
[00:40:26.540] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.
