Learning Archives - Page 6 of 8

How To Make The Most Of The 30% Feedback Strategy

TomLearningSeptember 29, 2015August 21, 202248 Comments

Feedback strategy is often focused on Giving feedback, but this is only part of the process. We have lots of assessment tactics for providing, offering and giving feedback, but little on receiving it.

This post outlines a feedback strategy to help you or your students receive feedback successfully.

The Feedback Dynamic

“It takes two to tango”, as the song goes, and the dynamic of feedback depends on a relationship between two (or more) people.

The feedback giver
The receiver of feedback

It is common for us to have feedback strategies for giving feedback, but we can also develop feedback strategies to receive critique effectively.

Receiving feedback has a unique set of skills, strategies, and dispositions. We overlook these too often and then wonder why feedback is not effective.

The 30 Percent Feedback Strategy

30% feedback is a feedback strategy for the receiver. It signals to the feedback giver your overall progress. Is it 30% complete or 90% complete?

You are referring to the progress of whatever you are making or creating. You might be writing an article or essay or creating a piece of artwork. Whatever the subject of the feedback is, signal the progress you believe you have made.

Consider these two statements: “This is 95% complete” and “I just started, it is about 10% done”. Imagine the mindset of these two people or students. Do you notice the difference? The different attitudes are essential to the effective receiving of feedback.

Don’t Polish Anything

I first came across this technique from Jason Freedman’s blog post and realised how useful it would be for students seeking feedback from others. Jason explains that he learned it from a colleague at 42Floors:

It’s a trick I learned from our investor, Seth Lieberman. It came about because I once asked him for feedback on a product mockup, and he asked if I felt like I was ninety percent done or thirty percent done. If I was ninety percent done, he would try to correct me on every little detail possible because otherwise a typo might make it into production. But if I had told him I was only thirty percent done, he would gloss over the tiny mistakes, knowing that I would correct them later. He would engage in broader conversations about what the product should be.
In this particular case, I was indeed ninety percent done and so we debated a few details, I got my pat on the back, and I moved on.
As he was leaving, he said:
“Next time come to me when you’re only thirty percent done and I’ll give you thirty percent feedback.”
So a few months later on a different project, I came to him with some questions on a project that was still in its early stages and we wrestled with the direction together. I didn’t polish anything and he made sure not to critique things he knew I would fix later. It was really freeing. I knew I wasn’t putting my best foot forward and he didn’t care. He was able to help me shift course without the sunk cost of throwing away a ton of work. Really awesome.
Jason Freedman

Imagine the time and energy you save if the feedback you offer is more targeted and you respond to these precise progress signals.

Your Progress Bar

For students, it could be as simple as a progress bar with their work.

What percentage do you think you have completed?
How much more do you think there is to do?

Before you receive feedback, signal to the other person your progress, talk about the features of early feedback and how later feedback is different.

The progress bar could even have markers for when to seek feedback to help structure those opportunities.

A Mindset Ready for Feedback

We need to help our students be open to feedback much earlier on in the making process.

Whether writing, drawing or building, being open to early feedback takes a specific, deliberate mindset switched to ‘open’ and ‘growth’.

This strategy’s key to success is a shared understanding of 30% or 90% feedback. We can develop our understanding of these levels and increase our readiness to offer the most appropriate support.

This responsibility also falls on the receiver. The additional signals they can offer to help us improve what they are doing.

Just remember feedback is a two-way street. We may refine our protocols for giving feedback, but there are many strategies we can implement to help us and our students receive feedback successfully.

This Simple Yet Wonderful Metaphor Will Steer You Towards Action

TomLearningSeptember 6, 201538 Comments

You will see over the next few months a range of posts about Legacy. The impact that children can have on the world around them is a topic that intrigues me. I will be sharing my emerging understanding of what Legacy means to me and the relevance to education and society more widely. I suppose this is the first of those posts.

Buckminster Fuller

Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American author and designer, architect and systems theorist. As an inventor and visionary he dedicated his life to making the world work for all of humanity. Something that is remarkable about his life was his staunch belief in the generalist approach. “Fuller did not limit himself to one field but worked as a ‘comprehensive anticipatory design scientist’ to solve global problems surrounding housing, shelter, transportation, education, energy, ecological destruction, and poverty.”

Creating silos in schools, through subjects or career pathways, is not likely to foster the thinkers we need. Fuller grappled with complex problems in a holistic manner. He chose to be interested in many areas of study encircling the problem. I always find stories of multidisciplinary teams or mindsets hugely encouraging. These are stories we need to pay more attention to in education.

Trimtab

During an interview for Playboy back in the early 1970s Fuller outlined a simple metaphor for the impact we can all have on the world.

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, “Call me Trim Tab.”

There is great ambition in these words, a message of hope that the individual within a system can make change. Fuller believed we can start with the self, to make changes and build momentum there. The ripples of our impact will soon happen.

I’m positive that what you do with yourself, just the little things you do yourself, these are the things that count. To be a real trim tab, you’ve got to start with yourself, and soon you’ll feel that low pressure, and suddenly things begin to work in a beautiful way.

Learning Legacy

This will form the basis of a longer post in the future, but it is worth mentioning here in the context of Fuller’s challenge for us all. I believe we need to spend more time considering the design of ambitious learning. To help the youngsters we work with develop the capacities aligned with Fuller’s metaphor. To design the opportunities in school for learners to push out against the world and maybe make it a little better.

In many ways this ambition is subdued by the knowledge that through learning we are developing the individual child. But it is the more outward looking, more ambitious holistic design of learning that maybe needs more attention.

What do you mean? I hear you ask. I suppose I think of the examples of school based work that I have been lucky enough to take a small part in over the last few years. Instead of just pretending to do a TEDx event, a primary school we worked with ran the first official event of its kind run by 7, 8 and 9 years olds. Instead of just creating new ideas for the Space Gallery at the British Science Museum one school invited the Education Officers to visit and pitched them.

The list goes on of little Trim Tabs in our schools.

Start Small

Where do you go from here? Learning projects or units of work do not always have the opportunity to have a vast, far reaching impact, so just remember it all begins with yourself.

As educators we can make small changes in how we think about learning.
We can consider how ambitious we have been in our design of learning.
We can foster a creative mindset that starts to believe in the impact we all can have – especially our students.
Whilst we might not be able to change the system, we can help our students see that little changes count.

Education Suffers from a Lack of Knowledge Urgency

Tom28 Days of Writing, Learning, TwitterFebruary 25, 20152 Comments

Dave Binks, a headteacher you would happily call a leader, was one of the first principals I worked with. He gave me the space and time to enjoy my teaching, to innovate and explore the untrodden path. To take risks and to fail.

Many years later I moved on and became a deputy headteacher myself and I really struggled. I had some of the hardest most challenging times in my working life. I struggled to find that balance between management and teaching and was having to compromise the quality of what I was doing – just to get it done!

I didn’t have access to the knowledge and ideas I needed in those moments when I needed it the most. How I wished I could have browsed Dave’s brain.

A Lack of Knowledge Urgency

We have a lack of knowledge urgency in our profession – we don’t feel the sting of wasted ideas or the importance of capturing and sharing our knowledge and experience, it simply is not in the front of our minds. There are over 430,000 teachers in the UK and in Australia just over 250,000 according to 2011 figures. But only a tiny fraction share ideas using Twitter.

On average in England over the last 25 years there have been around 15,000 teachers retiring from the profession every year. People like Dave who take their expertise and skill with them. That equates to nearly 525,000 years worth of teaching experience laying quiet and dormant on the back 9 of golf courses and between the aisles of garden centres. This saddens me.

This great body of latent knowledge going missing, but also the lack of urgency from current teachers to capture and share what they know. Let me give you an example of what I mean by knowledge urgency:

In 1972 the Imperial War Museum established the Department for Sound Records and began in earnest to archive and collate oral histories of those involved in conflicts and especially those involved in the First and Second world wars. It is a striking and extensive archive of over 56,000 hours worth of historical records. The urgency to capture this knowledge is clearly linked to the passing of the generations involved.

These pieces of knowledge are lengthy to produce and take time and deep thought to capture. Social technology has begun to reshape the timeframe needed to share our expertise all we need is a simple device and we can tweet and blog our experiences on the go.

Ross Selkirk Taylor was a British Army driver during the second world war and his pocket diary was his record of his experiences. Since then his grandson has begun tweeting his written diary entries, but in 1940 they were private to him and had no immediate impact on those around him. The postal service was often the sole means with which to share his experiences whilst away from home and that was heavily censored. The ranks of other army drivers could not learn from his published experiences and connect with him to learn. (Despite some hunting the original @DriverRoss account is no longer active.)

Twitter perfectly encapsulates the fragmentation of our knowledge and I think it has a direct impact on the frequency of sharing – the likelihood that people, teachers, openly share an idea or publish their thinking is increased if the scale is smaller.

Share What You Know

As teachers we need to be more open about our work and quickly realise that the whole profession can benefit from our collective expertise – we mustn’t become silos of knowledge ourselves. Nor do we want our knowledge and experience, our stories and ideas to lie dormant, our knowledge needs to live on and impact those around us, to be contextual and be flexible enough to improve the lives of as many people we can.

The phrase “Pearls of wisdom” is often attributed to this poem by James Russell Lowell.

These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon; The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.

I love the delicate description of the pearls of thought – “softly lucent as a rounded moon” – we need to ensure we treasure the jewels of knowledge we have – and continue to pluck them from their seabed and do more to share them with other teachers, display and publish them, string them on threads, and help everyone bathe in their moonlit glow.

Learning in Perpetual Beta

Tom28 Days of Writing, Learning, MindsetFebruary 23, 2015March 9, 20181 Comment

For today’s post I thought I would explore a little more deeply the themes and overlapping thinking surrounding my previous post about a Mindset of Failing. In particular I’d like to unpack this concept that learning is and always should remain in perpetual beta.

It is actually a considerable challenge to get perspective on the completeness of our work with students. I am not referring to when projects end or when we have finished that piece of artwork with them – the year long (sometimes much longer) development of learning relationships is often hard to wrap ourselves around. Since leaving the classroom I have experienced quite finite projects that have a short timeline and stuff you have to get done. I still find this refreshing.

Perpetual Beta = Prototyping Disposition

vIn an earlier post this month I referred to the mindset we need to take towards the things we create and the way we learn. It is not just about junk modelling or computer aided design or 3D printing or physical building – a disposition towards prototyping means we:

Are committed to the expertise and ideas we might gain from others and don’t just simply rely on our own perspective.
Believe in the value of feedback and how critique can move our ideas forward.
Engineer as many opportunities for feedback as we can as, early as we can.
Are willing to share what we create when it is extremely, painfully incomplete.

When a piece of software is being developed it has various stages it goes through, depending on the scale of the product of course. Beta is a time for testing, as defined below:

Beta, named after the second letter of the Greek alphabet, is the software development phase following alpha. It generally begins when the software is feature complete. Software in the beta phase will generally have many more bugs in it than completed software, as well as speed/performance issues and may still cause crashes or data loss. The focus of beta testing is reducing impacts to users, often incorporating usability testing. The process of delivering a beta version to the users is called beta release and this is typically the first time that the software is available outside of the organization that developed it.

Perpetual beta is when this state is extended, sometimes indefinitely, a web service or software product remains in constant development with feedback and testing driving new feature releases. A product remains in perpetual beta.

What does learning in perpetual beta mean?

The links here with the way we think about learning and feedback in particular are quite strong. In my post about the Mindset of Failing I pondered on the mental resilience of tennis players compared to other athletes. Losing points is regular and failing is part of the back and forth of a tennis match, very different to other sports. The post was commented on by Pam Hernandez who remarked that:

This made me think about how we traditionally provide feedback on student learning which is not unlike the analogy to football. I’m thinking American football in this case and getting an A on assignment is much like scoring a touchdown. It’s not uncommon to see teachers use sports analogies and comment “Homerun” or “Touchdown” on good work. I like the idea of rewarding effort along the way and making it okay to make mistakes along the way and be rewarded for the learning. It’s a different mindset for parents, teachers and students. (Pam Hernandez)

And it is here that we have the biggest opportunity to shift the way people are thinking about failure and failing. It is no small feat mind you. There are cultural and ethical stances people have that influence their perception of mistakes and failure in learning. We need to help the whole learning community appreciate this positive prototyping disposition. Learning in perpetual beta is all about continuous improvement with an emphasis on engineering as many opportunities for feedback as we can.

Take a look through some of these other posts from my this blog about assessment and feedback and plan to take some action:

Pic: failure is cool by Steffi Reichert

6 Actions To Help Your Learners Develop an Online Profile

TomLearningFebruary 22, 2015February 24, 20153 Comments

After reading about the repair work taking place on behalf of Lindsey Stone’s online profile (Hindsight is a wonderful thing), I was left wondering what it would be like if it all just, went away. I wonder about the fragility of our online profile and the roles they have within our lives.

There is another Tom Barrett. He is an American politician in fact and is the current Mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Who knows how are Google search results compare anymore, but if you run a search on “Tom Barrett” thankfully all the images are mayoral in nature and all the links are mine.

In the past I have been tweeted at, accused of terrible social policies or something along those lines. Which is rather unfortunate around election time. I wonder if the Democrat has ever had a conversation about his online profile and how he has to manage his. Presumably I am kind of getting in the way a little.

Learning About Developing an Online Profile

We have to help our students navigate these tricky waters. And they are quite tricky as the charts that are often set soon become obsolete and out of date. The speed with which social and online web development moves, paired with the shifting sands of trends means as a teacher or leader within a school it is indeed tricky remaining up to date.

But perhaps that is often the perceived mindset. We don’t know something so it is foreign and strange and out of our reach. The latest photo sharing app is alien to us, or the way youngsters interact within games feels unusual. However much the technology changes three elements should remain enduring.

A common sense approach to the way we talk to our students about their online profile and a channel to discuss it (this goes for the teachers too).
A willingness to model an open, positive experience of the use of social media in support of learning.
The ability to access and use social media in the school environment so it doesn’t become sidelined or a behind the bike sheds occurrence.
Active development of a public profile in the company of mentors, not something behind a walled garden.
Building personal portfolios is seen as an open endeavour across the organisation, a personal profile in school is no different than an online identity.
A clear, consistent understanding of online ethics is shared across all staff and the importance of an online profile is widely appreciated and wholly embraced.

It is hard to sail into uncharted waters but we can help our students understand the hidden currents and tricky tides whilst with us in a place of learning. If we don’t do this, if we step further and further back from this responsibility, either through a lack of knowledge or willingness, we aren’t helping the students in our care.

If we as educators choose not to care about developing an online profile, if we ourselves are not actively positive about the huge potential it has, running aground might be more common than we would like.

What other key elements of our work with students comes to mind? What other enduring areas of development do you see central to supporting this for our students?

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Category: Learning