Lap three: What? The plan
Now that we have a re-formulated assessment base to work from, the plan is to work collaboratively on democratising our feedback practice throughout the module. The main aim is to facilitate students in grasping the key concepts and competencies of the module. The backdrop to our case-study is a more student-centred, constructively-aligned assessment practice; but the focus of the case-study is on creating a more student-centred, constructively-aligned feedback practice. We plan to work on democratising feedback in the following way:
- Developing and embedding feedback literacy;
- Developing and embedding dialogical feedback;
- Developing and embedding feedforward;
- Developing and embedding flipped feedback
Feedback Plan at a glance
Part B. Educator's Resource on Feedback
Reflecting on Receiving Feedback
I was nervous about asking for and getting feedback on my work. This was a very personal piece of work and I felt exposed in doing it and exposed in getting feedback on it. It really put me in the shoes of my students who may sometimes feel like this. I was telling a personal life-story in order to hit home a point about feedback. I know that not all students, for all pieces of work, put their life into it, but I also know that many students feel very personally about the work they create and submit.
There was a delay in many people coming back to me with their feedback. The delay was simple, either they could not access the URL or they were under time constraints. But this delay in getting back to me made me feel more nervous and less confident in my work as the days went on. This made me understand the importance of timely feedback at an affective level.
I understand that this piece of work is not discipline specific but rather is on an overarching theme of feedback, namely the emotional impact that it can have. Thus, rather than ask discipline specific peers for feedback, I tried to get feedback from a cross-section of educators ranging from primary educators through to a number of peers in third level (Some peers from MALT and other peers who have not done MALT).
Tone it down!
I was most interested in whether I had got the message across clearly, particularly because some 30 years on it was still such an emotive issue for me. Most people giving me feedback said that they had both understood the message and would apply it in their practice. One educator asked if she could share it with her multi academy trust in the UK.
The feedback that I received was generally very good. Some of the optical feedback, I have acted on, such as changing the title to make it more specific and ‘punchy’, and relaxing the language in one of the quotes to make it read as I say it in the audio piece. Some of it, I would like to change but I cannot due to time and technical constraints, such as adding atmospheric music to the animation in certain parts.
There are two pieces of feedback, however, that I have decided not to take on board; the first is that the literature part is too ‘intellectual’ sounding. In contrast to this feedback, I agree with another person's feedback that it ‘adds weight to the anecdotal’. And, use of literature is part of the brief. The second piece of feedback was to 'tone down' the physics class animation because it looks more like a teacher having problems with discipline and class management rather than specifically focusing on the poor feedback element. I take the person’s point but have decided to leave it as is because this is the type of chaos which really went on in my physics class and I think the wry comedy juxtaposes with the serious message that I hope to transmit.
Getting feedback from such a wide audience and getting good feedback has instilled my confidence in this piece of work, but it did put me in student’s shoes while I waited with bated breath for their comments. Those who gave me feedback were happy to do so.
However, I cannot help but wonder how those giving feedback and me receiving feedback would have felt if the work had been extremely poor. Did the fact that I knew my peers would be looking at it motivate me to do a better piece of work? The emotional impact of giving and getting feedback on poor work is an area which I began looking at in my TEL MALT module and would like to explore in further detail at some stage in the future.