Feedback Matters

Via Scott MacClintic's weekly blog, Pelican Ponderings (http://smacclintic.edublogs.org), I came across this 2012 piece by Grant Wiggins - http://inservice.ascd.org/less-teaching-and-more-feedback/#.VLleImBWNSM.twitter.

As he states, "You don't need any 'teaching.' You only need a good feedback system."

This has been resonating me recently as I've utilized Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and the like to further explore math topics. Students today have SO many resources at their disposal that the role of the teacher can no longer be that of "dispenser of knowledge." After all, the knowledge is available to anyone at any time.

My purpose, as I see it, in a discussion-based classroom is to provide immediate feedback (hopefully in the form of good follow-up questions) and to enable feedback to be provided by others, as applicable, so that learning takes place. Try. Get feedback. Question. Get more feedback. Fail. Get feedback. This isn't easy, but it's necessary.

Interestingly, I experienced some frustration with an online class recently due exactly to the lack of this - timely, focused feedback. I wanted to talk and discuss what I was thinking and all that was available was asynchronous communication. I found this frustrating.

Immediate, applicable feedback is the foundation of a discussion-based classroom, and it's necessary for learning to take place.

Effective Instruction

In a recent blog update, Grant Wiggins (through whom I learned of Phillips Exeter's Harkness Method) shared the results of a large UCLA study that found a lack of creativity in classroom teaching. A few excerpts:

- Students ''scarcely ever speculate on meanings'' or discuss ''alternative interpretations.''

- a ''sameness'' of instruction, with teachers doing virtually all the talking ... on the average, only seven of 150 minutes of instruction in the course of a school day involved teachers' responses to individual students. Feedback and guidance to help students understand and correct their mistakes were often ''almost nonexistent.''

- for most students school is a place in which to listen, to respond occasionally when called on, to read short sections of texbooks and write short responses to questions on quizzes. Students rarely, the study found, read or wrote anything of some length. Most of the time, they listened or worked alone.

A few days ago, I finished the book "Building a Better Teacher," one of the highly-rated reads from 2014. A few excerpts:

- It was crucial, for instance, to make sure that students did not talk just to (the teacher), but to the entire class.

- Watching (them) teach, (the teacher) had grasped the importance of getting her students to talk.

- "How do you know that?" "What do other people think about that?"

- The key to moving a discussion forward was to listen to students' questions, figure out what they needed to understand, and construct a response to pull them there.

- moving from the usual ask-tell ping-pong to something looser. "Facilitating."

As I read these, I thought about what I'm trying to do in my classroom. I want a discussion-based, facilitated classroom, with the student at the center, in charge of her/his learning. I will readily say that I (will most definitely always) have a lot of learning to do, but I am finding that the Harkness Method is proving to be a very effective way to provide high-quality instruction.