Giving/Getting Good Feedback Takes ______________ (fill in the blank)

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

On Sunday evening, at JALT 2013, I’ll be co-facilitating a workshop on student feedback. I think that’s a pretty good thing, mainly because I dig getting feedback from my students.  I don’t do anything fancy.  Usually I end my lessons with a set of 2 open ended statements on the white board and ask the students to complete the statements before they leave the class.  And the open ended statements aren’t really that creative either.  For example:

Two things I thought were a waste of time in today’s class are...

Two things I learned during today’s class are...

While I don’t get the most in depth data from these kinds of open statements, at least feedback like this lets me see which activities were a hit and which not so much.  If I have time at the end of a class, I change it up and write the following on the board:

In today’s class I didn’t like __________ because

A)

B)

Not a huge difference, but enough that I can find out some specific reasons why an activity didn’t go down so well.  That allows me to make some small changes and use the activity again with a modicum of success.  I remember I was doing an activity that required students to draw a picture.  A few of the students wrote on their open ended statements that they hated the activity because 1) they weren’t good at drawing and 2) it took too long to draw.  So the next time I ran the activity, instead telling the students to draw a picture of something, I told them to draw an outline of it instead.  And that cut down on both the pretty-picture-anxiety as well as the time spent drawing in English class.

When I started getting feedback from my students, I think the most common response to the question, “What two parts of today’s lesson didn’t you like?” was “Nothing.”  Page after page of “nothing” and “nothing” and some more “nothing.”  That meant I had “nothing” to work on, which made me feel pretty good.  But it also meant I had “nothing” to work with either.  But I didn’t have to worry for long.  Because students warmed up to the whole idea of feedback pretty quickly and about four months into the school year, they started getting specific.  The other day one of my students wrote, “I don’t like doing simple conversation warm-ups.  It is not challenging.  Please give us some difficult English at the start of class.”  

So what changed?  Why did my students start getting more specific with both their gripes and their compliments?  Maybe it’s because I collected feedback regularly, and not being satisfied with a bunch of “nothings” showed the students that I took what they had to say seriously.  Or maybe it was because I took the weekly feedback, translated it into English, punched it into a spread sheet, and passed it back to the students every Monday.  That way their feedback was fresh in their minds as we kicked off classes and probably a few of them noticed that what they had written the previous week actually led to changes in what was currently happening in class.  

Yeah...maybe it was those things I just wrote, or maybe it was just the fact that my students needed time to practice giving feedback before they could do it well.  It’s not as if they had ever spent significant amounts of time completing open ended statements before.  But if I really want to know, I guess I could make an open ended statement like, “Two reasons I started to give more detailed feedback are,” and find out the next time I collect feedback.

I want to thank members of my PLN who have taken the time to blog about classroom/student feedback.  Here is a short list of some of my favorite posts.  If you have a moment, please leave a comment with links to other posts on feedback you’ve liked.  I’ll add them to the list and be sure to pass them on to the participants in Sunday’s workshop.

“End of Course Feedback” from Ceri Jones at Close Up: a categorizing and processing style of collecting feedback that, in many ways, actually mirrors a language class.

“Payback Time: Lessons From The Harshest Teacher Trainers (My Students)” from Alex Walsh at Alien Teachers : an very detailed teacher/course assessment survey as well as Alex’s personal reflections on the collected data.  A great example of how to take feedback and use it in RP.

“Orange is the new please consider stopping” from Michael Griffin at ELT Rants, Reviews and Reflections: Mike is one of my co-facilitators (along with Anna Loseva) on Sunday, and in this post he explains how three colors and the phrases, “please consider stopping,” “please consider doing,” and “please keep doing,” are all you need to gather some wicked feedback.

“Feedback in the hallway” from Josette LeBlanc at Throwing Back Tokens: a post to knock down the idea that feedback has to be anonymous or formal for it to matter.  

"Meeting students' ever-changing, never-ending needs" from Anne Hendler at Living Learning: a post on how sometimes students themselves aren't so sure of what they want or even how they feel.

"Teacher intention vs learner reality" from Tyson Seburn at 4C: an empathic, reflective and humorous exploration of how Tyson's image of what he was doing in an EAP writing lesson and his students' potential perspective might be very different.

"Feedback goes both ways" from Rose Bard's Teaching Journal: A rich post on the importance of feedback, regardless of the difficulties that getting such feedback entails and the need for patience as both teachers and students struggle with the hard questions of why and how we learn.

Who am I Talking to Anyway?

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

one of the many non-restricted free images
available on Flickr's The Commons collection

Lately I’ve been thinking about silence.  What does it mean when I ask a question I think is sure to generate conversation only to find the last word I say echoing around the classroom before it is finally swallowed up by the creaking of chairs and the slight rustle of student notebooks?  Is it a sign that students lack motivation (whatever that means) to answer the question?  Did they even understand the question?  On a sunny Friday afternoon last week, I ran a lesson on the US debt ceiling, the chances of a US default on its debt, and what it might mean for the Japanese economy.  I had a series of questions I thought would generate some heated discussion (I was particularly fond of, “If you could ask any question you wanted to a US senator or house representative, what would it be”).  There were sporadic pockets of conversation during the discussion phase of the lesson.  But there was definitely more silence than speaking.  So I thought I might review some of the reasons for the silence and some of the things I could have done differently.

 

• Diffusion of Responsibility is the psychological principal that the more people gathered together, the less pressure any particular member of the group will feel to speak up.  Here’s a pretty great video clip on YouTube to see how this idea can play out in an experimental setting.  Basically, when you got a large group of people (say 15 lower intermediate level high school English students) in a room without any clear definition of what roles and responsibilities they have at any particular moment, you are setting yourself up for long, long periods of silence.  If a participant in an experiment is willing to wait 20 minutes to mention clouds of smoke billowing into a room, how much longer will students wait to answer a question pitched at an entire class.  That doesn’t mean that questions for generating conversation asked to an entire class are worthless, it just means that first students need to have a pretty good sense of what they are being asked to do.  If I had the lesson to do over again, I probably would have clearly delineated the conversation component of the lesson.  And I would have started off with a series of questions that, while requiring personal answers, where a bit easier to answer.  Things like, “Do you think that Japanese economy has been getting better lately?” and “Do you worry about getting a job after you graduate from university?”  I think this section of the class would have worked out better if I had also allowed students to work in pairs and generate potential responses before requiring them to take the next step of sharing that response with the class.   
•  Students are often more aware of group dynamics than I think.  Students might not have answered a question because they were genuinely trying to make space for someone else to answer the question, maybe a friend they knew needed a bit more time to get their thoughts together.  One way around this is to designate one or two students to have “Teacher's Rights” for a class.  In my lessons, "Teacher's Rights" means that, after answering two questions themselves, designated students are then allowed to also call on other students and solicit answers.  This lets me tap students own, often superior knowledge, of class dynamics and the needs of their fellow students.  If I could have a do-over for this lesson, I would difinetly use "Teacher's Rights" in this class.   
• Introverts vs. extroverts: Chuck Sandy has a great post on group dynamics up over on the iTDi site touching on the fact that introverts are, “simply people who work best and learn most in quieter low-key environments.”  So while I was sweating through the discussion phase of the class, thinking things like, “Why doesn’t A-Chan answer the question, she knows the answer,” A-Chan was most likely intently waiting to hear what another student gave as an answer.  From her point of view, listening to the answer and taking notes was perhaps her key learning strategy.  When I called on her and pressured her into answering (which is what I did)  I might have been steeping on an important chance for her to learn just to get my own immediate needs met.  It would have been more productive to create a role that allowed introverts to feel as if they are active and useful members of the class.  If I had asked A-Chan to be the official note taker for the discussion, or tasked her with looking up words when asked for a meaning by a speaker.  I could have organized the class so that it played more to her strengths. 
• Perfectionist Inhibition: Students don’t want to answer a question unless they are sure they have the right answer.  This is often sighted as one of the biggest obstacles to getting students talking in Japan.  I’m not sure it’s quite the problem that many people make it out to be.  But when students are struggling with a new concept (and a batch new lexis around government) the anxiety around saying something embarrassing can get bumped up significantly.  John Fanselow suggests giving students a certain amount of time before verbally answering a question to write down their response in their notebook.  If I did the class over, I would designate two minutes after each question for writing.  At the end of two minutes, students would turn over their notebooks and then verbally answer.  In general, this step usually leads not only to more answers from a wider variety of students, but more linguistically complex answers as well.
• WHITA (Who the Hell am I Talking to Anyway) Syndrome: When do we ever talk to 15 people at a time, anyway?  Is this a natural way to use language?  I guess it is natural for teachers.  But is it fair to expect our students to see spraying the class with buckshot answers as being particulary useful?  During the lesson, I had the students sitting in a large circle, but I think I would definitely change the class layout if I were to run this lesson again. For example, the clover classroom layout seems to work pretty well in these kinds of activities. 

  

  Students often will share opinions in their immediate group of three, or with the adjacent leaf of 3 students.  Once the conversation gets rolling, there will be more communication across the room.  At least with this set up, there is a sense of whom one is addressing and a greater sense of immediacy in regards to who will be listening to the answers. 

Of course, even if I make all of these changes, there’s no gurantee that students are going to actively engage in conversation.  Whether a student connects up to a particular topic is very much a personal choice.  But at the end of this debt ceiling lesson, A-Chan came up to me and said, “Kevin, if America defaults on it’s debt, the Japanese economy could be hurt?  After electing a new prime minister and working so hard to fix our economy, we could have another recession?  Don’t the people in America know that it’s not fair?”  Here was a 16 year old girl who has lived her whole life in difficult economic times.  And she was asking me (who happens to be a US citizen), the question that, most likely, all the students wanted answered.  I took a few seconds to compose myself and said, “I don’t know if they are thinking about it.  But you are right.  It is definitely not fair.”  As A-Chan walked out of the room, frowning and head bowed, I actually started to cry.  There’s not much I can do about making the world more fair in general.  But if I give my lessons a bit more thought, maybe I can create the kind of environment where A-Chan can ask the rest of the class what she only felt comfortable asking me.  And maybe by sharing those kinds of questions, she will be able to walk through the rest of her day a little less weighted down by the concerns that she was shouldering alone on that sunny Friday afternoon.