‘Feedback’: it’s the unwanted shrill shriek that announces a guitar or microphone as being too close to the monitor. It’s the ear drum-splitting whinny that can stop a band in its tracks and send the audience scurrying, fully riled, to the bar.
It’s also a decisive and highly effective tool for motivation and self-direction.
In a previous blog post on gamification we mentioned the core principles of a successfully gamified environment (as identified by Gamification Corp): Friends, Feedback and Fun. Feedback, in order to be successful and sustainable, is itself dependent on a continuous loop of activity:
In short: you do something, you see the consequence of the ‘something’ that you did, you modify how you do that ‘something’ based on those observations and finally you do that ‘something’ again with your tweaks in place.
Whether you’re in a classroom, working for an international ELT publisher or immersed in a gloriously designed video game, this loop is what you depend on for directing your energies in the most productive way possible. What’s more, this loop is available in two distinctive versions: positive and negative.
A positive feedback loop praises, celebrates and champions a certain behaviour with a view of amplifying it, whereas a negative feedback loop is used to reduce unwanted or unproductive behaviours. As lovely as the prospect may appear, however, a world of only positive feedback loops would quickly become unbalanced. With only positive loops in place then the most able/productive/skilled participants in the process would continue to control the available resources of the given context.
Take a traditional classroom, for example; with only a positive feedback loop in operation (if that) then it might be fair to suggest that the most eager and able students in the room will be the ones providing the answers, being praised for doing so and then feeling empowered to continue doing it. Meanwhile, the less confident or able learners will gradually feel marginalised and disinclined to contribute to the lesson’s interactions as they see the pace and level of the lesson accelerate away from them. The main resource in that context (teacher input and attention) is being monopolised by the minority.
[Aside: I can honestly admit to perpetuating this positive loop disequilibrium during my early teaching days. The stronger, more vocal students often become the ones that I would refer to in the first instance. As a new teacher it was often easier to feed into the interactions that needed less correction and…, well,… work. Confession over.]
This concept may be a familiar from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers where, amongst other things, he suggests that the reason a disproportionate number of top level ice hockey players have birthdays in January and February is that youth leagues pick teams according to calendar year. This means that children born early in the year are almost a year older (and accordingly more mature, bigger and stronger) than those born at the end of the year – giving them a small but significant advantage. This sets off a positive feedback loop, as they are identified as superior athletes, praised, given extra coaching, more opportunities to play against stronger opposition etc. Gladwell calls this “accumulative advantage”.
What might be necessary in our classroom example is a negative feedback loop of some kind; some kind of mechanism that helps to marshall the key resource (teacher attention) so that the other, less prominent learners are given more of a chance to contribute. A negative feedback loop is a loop that reduces certain behaviours. So, in the example of the classroom, the more ‘vocal’ a learner is the harder/more challenging the lesson needs to become for them. They’re getting the answers right, which is terrific, but they need to be shown that it gets trickier for them as they do so; perhaps there are fewer occasions/opportunities/reasons to tap into the teacher resource as they proceed. Perhaps they are given more self-directed activities or interactions to collaborate on, or are maybe tasked with coaching a group of their own peers in the room.
In his fantastic blog post on feedback loops and employee motivation, Andrzej Marczewski suggests that the interplay of positive and negative loops is an effective strategy for generating engagement, something he demonstrates effectively in terms of a gaming context.
What games are capable of delivering (and what ELT companies aren’t, and what classrooms need to master) is immediate, relevant feedback. A gamer can see instantaneously see the consequences of their in-game actions and make corrective decisions accordingly. In their report ‘Teaching In a Digital Age‘ Pearson picks up on how tech is enabling what it refers to as ‘rapid’ feedback in many education environments. A case study conducted with Florida Virtual School revealed that teachers were using IM apps, text messages and good ol’ phone calls to make themselves available to their learners whenever they were needed. Furthermore, the online nature of the learning content and activities means that the learners were able to get a clear and immediate sense of how they were faring with the learning objectives.
I’d be intrigued to see how these concepts could be applied to ELT publishers and their various business objectives. How can they best secure immediate and meaningful feedback from the teachers and learners who are actually using the final product? Surely a bi-annual market research trip to one or two schools isn’t as rapid as it ought to be. That’s just vapid feedback rather than rapid. There needs to be some agility in observing how published/delivered products are actually received as well as how they are produced in the first place. It’s possible with online platforms to collect and collate tonnes of data on user behaviour, preferences and comparative strengths, but where in that treasure trove of information is there a reaction to the final product ? What is it in those numbers that lets you know that the learner is happy with what they’ve experienced?
Somewhere in that tinny whine is a Hendrix-sized roar waiting to be unleashed.
Featured Photo Credit: Tom.Whitwell via Compfight ccf=”htt
Some good points here, Tim. Publishers are notoriously reluctant to engage with ‘end users’ unless they are actually preparing a new project. For many years, I have been plotting the relationship between SLA research and publishers’ response times and in general, there’s about a 10 year lag. They have little interest in breaking with tradition and when they do, as in the case of Cobuild for example, they are often left with egg on their faces, as teachers (also a relatively traditional crowd!) can easily reject the latest offerings.
Ten-year lag…hehehe…time to pay the piper. 😀
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the comment and for sharing your insight into this. A 10 year lag, eh? That’s incredible. It makes me wonder if we’re dealing with a generational issue inasmuch as once the learners who are familiar with rapid developments in tech and its surrounding culture become educators themselves will we start seeing changes in these attitudes? Or will there always be this delay signal?
Tim,
Nice post, my man – and some great links to boot 😉 That one from the boyz and girlz at Pearson looks very cool (must check it out in more detail).
As Steve notes above – there is a lot of reluctance (on the part of publishers) to really “engage” with students…their “real” customers (esp. with textbooks) 😉
We often say – if education were a “real business”, most of our institutions would be “bankrupt”. It’s funny how so many publishers have done so well for so long – without a serious and meaningful “customer focus”!
Take care,
T..
Right on point, Professor Gurr. Education entering internet-based mass media is changing the game; this will make it into a real business before you can say, “Holy obsolete textbook series, Batman!” More evenly distributed access to great-usually more relevant and often more superior-content and content creators is a fine thing, indeed. Pubs that “get” this and get on board will reap the benefits in the years to come; those still unwilling to gather their old product and decaying model of producing, marketing, and distributing it and shoot it in the head before someone else does will soon surely wish they had.
Hi T.
Thanks for the great comment and glad you enjoyed the post. I completely agree with you about the “invisible” stakeholders in the education enterprise. So much comes down to the question “What are we all about?” How many publishers would be able to say (wholeheartedly) that they put learners’ needs above profit?
Tim,
Nice post, my man – and some great links to boot 😉 That one from the boyz and girlz at Pearson looks very cool (must check it out in more detail).
As Steve notes above – there is a lot of reluctance (on the part of publishers) to really “engage” with students…their “real” customers (esp. with textbooks) 😉
We often say – if education were a “real business”, most of our institutions would be “bankrupt”. It’s funny how so many publishers have done so well for so long – without a serious and meaningful “customer focus”!
Take care,
T..
Incentives for teachers to provide feedback would help. As a teacher, if I don’t like something about a book, I’m not going to write to the publisher unless it’s a major mistake. But small things like, “Why does this exercise practice the verb to be, when the grammar box didn’t show the very to be?” aren’t worth the bother. And if it’s something global, like this book doesn’t have enough writing practice or scaffolding or whatever, I’m just going to buy a different book.
Now I’m not sure what kind of incentives make sense…Cash? Free books? having the publisher teach class for a day? Those would be nice.
Hi Walton,
Thanks for the comment and you raise a really interesting point; what’s *worth* giving feedback on?
This is just an idea: what if the publisher provided an online version of the print components you had just purchased and you were able to go to this document whenever you found an error/substandard activity and ‘tag’ it right on the virtual page. What if, every time you did this you earned credit that could then be put towards some techy rewards (a new Mac or external hard drive or something), do you think something like that might have some appeal for teachers?
That would be good. Presumably teachers would see everyone else’s tags so publishers didn’t have to wade through 60 comments that say, “This word is misspelled” or the like.
Hi Tim,
Interesting stuff. ELT publishing was described to me, in my early days as an editor (i.e. about 6 months ago!) as a ‘dog food market’. You don’t sell dog food to dogs, you sell to the owners, i.e. the teachers. The thing is, publishers don’t sell materials to the teachers either. The materials are sold to administrators, directors and school owners, aren’t they? So often the teachers get no choice in the matter, never mind the students.
Ideally , I’d have thought it would be great to get regular 360 degree feedback, from all relevant stakeholders, both formative and a summative, so that decisions made on content are informed by a variety of opinions from different sources.
Although maybe that much feedback would blow the Marshall stack!
Hi Rich,
Thanks for the comment and that’s an excellent point. Your dog food metaphor is spot on (and might go some way to describe the resulting output of some publishing houses). It’s an odd situation when, in the business of education, the learners seem to be the least considered of all parties (even though there are more of them, they are the final ‘client’ for all involved and there is an unending stream of them). But, I guess when Administrators hold the keys to both the budget *and* the means of assessing how effective the materials they’ve purchased for their students actually are (tests and assessments) it’s going to be incredibly difficult to get a clear view of how things are being received. Too much white noise for the feedback, perhaps 😉
Good point Richard !
It’s so unfortunate that publishers have not seen the teachers’ feedback as an asset to their material. The way I see it, collecting feedback from teachers from different parts of the world would be most appropriate.
Well, it’s highly likely that all publishers get feedback and material reviews from teachers for all their products, however, I’ve seen little in the way of feedback from the students themselves. Teachers will often report the feelings of the students, but I’d argue that this is at least a little bit biased and the opinions really can’t be used as a true gauge of the students feelings.
You wrote: “What might be necessary in our classroom example is a negative feedback loop of some kind; some kind of mechanism that helps to marshall the key resource (teacher attention) so that the other, less prominent learners are given more of a chance to contribute.”
I would be very careful introducing negative feedback loops into the classroom as they can produce unintended results and turn people off. It is much better to put positive loops into effect to achieve your desired behavior. Moreover I question that teacher attention is the key resource in the classroom, rather I think it is time, especially the time that students need to spend on tasks directed towards specific goal orientated results.
I am wondering if you could expand on what you mean by teacher attention. More specifically, teacher attention to what?
Aren’t we all hoping that this is where agile publishing will take us? We produce and distribute the material in smaller, quicker chunks. (I was going to use ‘piecemeal’, but that means ‘unsystematically’!) This means we can get faster feedback, which allows us to update and improve that chunk, and also informs the production of the next chunk. So, digital might be the thing that finally ‘fixes’ ELT publishing!
All we need is a way of ensuring the feedback comes from teachers and learners, as well as administrators and school directors. Are we going to have ‘Like’ buttons on exercises?