Thanks for squashing my idea. You cut me off as I was sharing it and threw it on the ground. You trampled on my idea. You made me watch as you extinguished that precious little spark and yeah, you squashed it.
We obviously approached the chat from different places. You see, I thought we were there to share some ideas. You know, like new things we hadn’t considered yet. It seemed you had just brought your pre-loaded high calibre idea sniper rifle. Those ideas didn’t stand a chance; I mean they barely had a moment to breathe.
But did you hear that other sound? No? Well, you were busy dropping and squashing ideas, so how could you. That was the sound of a crack in my creative confidence. It’ll be a while before that gets fixed. I hope it gets fixed.
When you look around the room and notice others, yeah, those other quieter voices. Or even the silent ones. You know why they are silent, right? The cracks in their confidence haven’t been fixed. Creative cracks just grew. They still have ideas; I know that. They just keep quiet, choosing not to participate in the fortnightly Idea Duck Hunt.
I just wanted to let you know that there are thousands of idea headstones carved because of people like you. We mourn those precious little sparks, those little glimpses of something new, different and unexpected. We still think about those ideas and the fleeting moments we had with them.
Although our gradual creative grief makes us not want to share, our ideas keep coming. They brim up when we least expect it — entrusted to our notebooks, napkins and daydreams. We know they will have their time in the sun probably when you and your shadow have moved on.
In our work and learning, the quality of creative culture can be directly linked to the quality of the feedback culture.
We might also call this a Culture of Critique with its associated processes and dispositions.
It is no real surprise that we should invest time, energy and effort in getting good at feedback. What follows is an outline of a a handy technique, I will coin Second Score, which can aid the way we receive feedback from others.
It is pretty straightforward, basically we give ourselves a (you guessed it dear reader) Second Score. But importantly the assessment is about the way we received the feedback.
Let’s imagine the scenario where you have created a diagram to visualise a key concept. It will form part of larger written report you are collaborating on with your team. You pitch in the version you have drafted over the last few hours and have asked for some critique or feedback from others. That feedback arrives from a few of your team and overall it seems heavy handed and too general in detail to be useful. [PAUSE]
So at this moment just as you complete the reading of the feedback comments, you have a choice. We all have a choice in these moments. How we choose to receive the feedback. It is this reception that we can rate or assess. By explicitly thinking about your Second Score (how we receive the feedback) we increase our self awareness at this critical moment, increasing the likelihood of openness and more favourable conditions for it to be received well.
[PLAY] In this scenario we might: (a) throw up our hands and agree never to contribute a visual element to future reports (b) write down some questions in response to help clarify what needs your attention first (c) Nod our heads, retreat to our happy place, change nothing (d) delete the original files and say “I thought that is what you meant, oh fine, I can’t win!” (e) corner one of the feedback providers and ask them what their problem is.
You can hopefully see the choice that might score more favourably using our Second Score.[1] Although we might judge the quality of the feedback to have been low, we can happily give ourselves a higher Second Score in terms of how we received it. Well done you.
For us and for younger learners this type of technique will potentially develop a strong reflective habit. In many ways this falls into the meta-cognitive bucket insomuch that the act of reflecting on how we receive feedback. I am not sure if you can put the word meta in front of feedback but it feels like this is a meta-feedback technique.
So the next time you are providing feedback, and especially when we are on the receiving end consider your Second Score.
I started 2015 in Perth. Well in actual fact I had trips to Brisbane and Sydney as aperitifs and then headed to Western Australia. I was helping with some professional learning days at a large independent girls school we have been working with since the beginning of 2014. Our mantra for the sessions was:
Keep the main thing, the main thing
And feedback with its long lost twin, feedforward, is pretty close to being one of the most important elements of learning and curriculum design. I will spend some time in future posts sharing how I see it all and how it aligns with a prototyping disposition. For now, here are some great blog highlights from educators sharing their thinking on feedback as part of #28daysofwriting.
Alex Gingell shares how he used an Experience Tour to help with the professional learning discussions on feedback in his school.
I wanted staff to ‘immerse’ themselves in feedback. To gain an understanding of how feedback works across the school and to give them a tool that would enable them to develop their own perspective of feedback in their practice. This tool is designed to be used over a slightly longer period of time and having started, I would now like to provide the opportunity for staff to continue their ‘tours’, moving from reflecting on feedback in books, to experiencing feedback in each other’s classrooms.
Great to see the DIY Toolkit being hacked to suit the needs of our school developments. An interesting post well worth a look.
In this post from the Four Seasons in One Kiwi blog, @StephT shares some of the discussion about feedback in terms of leading a school.
a good leader shows they are human, takes on board feedback, uses it to improve the way things are done but does not allow themselves to sink under the weight of it. We did not think that the leader that journeys up the Nile in a heavy armour plated frigate was that of a good modern leader. That, we felt, was a leader that ignores feedback and has armoured ears, which could, consequently turn into a disaster zone.
Great to get some on the ground, fresh insight into the principal role within a school – read the rest of the post above.
This post from Dave Stacey outlined an interesting concept to explore when structuring the timing of feedback. Something I will be returning to in a future post of my own.
We need to get much better about the point at which we give our feedback and make sure students can act on it (DIRT time is an idea that’s been kicking around for a couple of years, and if you’re a teacher if you’re marking without it, you’re probably wasting a chunk of your time – try here and here to start, but there are loads of great blogs on it). We can restructure our assessments, we can make better use of cloud technology to provide feedback BEFORE the final deadline, or ensure that students get a second go at delivering that presentation.
Nicola Richards shares her first steps into using the SOLO Taxonomy in helping students understand the specific parts of their journey. By the sounds of it the taxonomy helped the class also provide effective feedback to peers, which is often tricky if we don’t have a notion of what specifically to say.
So my first real “work” for my class this year was to write a paragraph with a video as a stimulus. Once they were finished we discussed the key concepts and then I asked them to peer assess the paragraphs using a simple SOLO rubric. Most found it easy to identify where their partners work was at and could also identify next steps. I can see me using this regularly for peer, self and teacher feedback. I am passionate about the use of SOLO taxonomy (thanks @arti_choke) and keep finding ways to incorporate it in my teaching and learning. This was a great example as it fulfills many of the key requirements of effective feedback too.
As Ken Blanchard says, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” But it would seem there are certain things that dictate our appetite for feedback. According to Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone, the co-authors of Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well, there are specific variables that distort the way we perceive feedback from others.
The following is taken from the BIG Think clip above.
“The first is your Baseline. In the literature this is called set point sometimes. It’s sort of a ‘how happy or unhappy are you,’ in the absence of other events in your life. Where’s that level that you come back to?”
“… the reason this matters for feedback, particularly if you have a low set point or baseline, positive feedback can be muffled for you. The volume is turned down; it’s harder for you to hear it,”
Heen explains that the second variable is Swing, or how much we are moved off of our baseline by any feedback. And the third variable for effective feedback is Recovery, or how quickly we return to our baseline.
It is useful to consider these three factors in the classroom as well, providing us some further ways to consider the impact of feedback for learners. Additionally this helps us to remain focused on how we are making this relevant to individual learners.
