Zak's Weekly Musings (April 24, 2022)
In a recent study, Adam Grant found an interesting paradox when it comes to soliciting and sharing feedback. He found that when we seek feedback we create a wide funnel that invites comments on a wide range of issues that can actually be somewhat unhelpful; however, when we solicit feedback and then share feedback back out with the people who provided it, you increase efficacy by narrowing that funnel in a way that helps others concentrate on issues that are important to you and controllable by you. This finding speaks to the powerful benefits not just of asking our students for feedback (think: WEI and student-teacher surveys), but in sharing the results of this feedback with them.
When we think of collecting feedback, we should think of it as a jumping-off point to fuel dialogue with students, as opposed to something we mull over in private or with colleagues alone. A bunch of dots and pie charts may allow our minds to run wild with hypotheses, but they don’t actually lend a ton of clarity to what’s working and what we could work on.
When I was teaching full-time, I would take screenshots of the student-teacher survey responses that most stoked my curiosity, and I’d create a short slidedeck around these data. In class, I would then share these slides with my students, explain my interpretation of the data, and then ask students to either refute or corroborate my interpretation. Depending upon the trust that I’d established with students over the course of the year, I would solicit this explanatory feedback via a class discussion or via an anonymous Google Form, Socrative, or PollEverywhere. If I opted for the latter, I would project students’ anonymous responses onto the SmartBoard, review them in real-time, and share my thoughts. This exercise allowed me to concentrate the conversation around those few focal points from the student-teacher survey that I cared most about. In this way, I could structure and shape the conversation in a way that would be most productive for me and my own professional growth.
As this year winds down, next year is already ramping up. Let me challenge all of us to prepare for next year by tapping into the experiences of our students this year. Please take time over these next several weeks to share some snapshots of your dots and your student-teacher surveys with students. Get curious about what it means, ask questions, and establish an open dialogue. In the same way that nobody knows our students better than us, the fact is that nobody knows us better than our students.
If you take a look at this month’s WEI presentation, you’ll notice that it is a stripped down version of the data sans my own interpretation, analysis, or musings. Rather, let me encourage you to go to your students for these things.