Photobombing
This post is a snapshot of the teaching and learning that takes place in Room 210 in Brewster High School. The picture was taken on May 3, 2017, and it’s one of those snapshots where you eventually notice that someone has photobombed it:
In this case, I like to think that the people are photobombing the turtle, not the other way around.
The day of this writing is a Wednesday. I’m at work today. Yesterday, I was out, because my entire family was diagnosed with strep throat and pinkeye1. For four days last week, I was in North Salem for a conference, which is why I’ve dragged myself back to work today — that’s too long way from the classroom, regardless of how I feel or how I teach.
The result of all this illness and conferencing is that students in Room 210 have only seen me once in person since Monday, April 24. We are only a few days away from the AP exam and a month from the Regents , and I can’t force my voice above a whisper, if “whisper” means “husky frog that’s been screaming all night.” There’s also what you might imagine is acute exhaustion, not just from being sick myself, but from helping a three-year-old and a thirteen-month-old deal with being sick2.
Five years ago, this situation would have put me in such a heightened state of anxiety that I’d have probably been wheeled out of here3. Now? Well, now we can talk about how the course is built for this. It’s built to continue during a planned three-day absence for a conference. It’s built for unexpected catastrophes, like a sick household, and expected ones, like the stress of AP week. It doesn’t matter if I can shout or barely speak: The entire course has been redesigned from nuts to bolts so that we learn interstitially, when we can and when we need to.
Nowhere is that paradigm shift more evident — and therefore more in need of the occasional spotlight — than in how feedback works. Assessment and feedback are the backbone of instruction; when they no longer resemble traditional assessment and feedback, our time is never wasted when we talk about that change.
But let’s talk about rumors first.
Rumor-Mongering
Rumors are an interesting species of information, especially in a high school. When I was first hired to teach in Brewster, for instance, the rumor was that I’d previously had a career as an underground rapper and DJ. I’ve never determined how that rumor started, just that it persisted for years4.
Other rumors are less hilarious. As I began changing the way I teach, the first rumor to take root was that I don’t teach books. I remember a colleague saying to me one day, as if remarking that rain makes one wet, “You don’t like books, right?” I think I was too perplexed to answer, which she might have taken as agreement. “Yes, of course — this rain is making us wet!”
As part of a focus on modeling writing and flipping instruction, I’ve written about my love of literature and the importance of teaching it. I still show this video on the power of literature as part of different units on empathy. And I also still, you know, teach literature, in the sense that it is assigned and expected of students:
That’s the intricate framework for a unit about reading 1984, among other canonical works. Juniors ought to recognize it, since it’s taught to some extent every year. It includes literature and students reading literature, as near as I can tell.
The rumor that I don’t assign/teach/like literature is easy to trace, though, which is important. I teach Paul Graham’s “Age of the Essay,” and I make no secret of how much I agree with his conclusions. I also agree with John Holt’s idea of what makes children hate reading. I don’t think their perspectives negate the teaching of literature, but they are complex and uncomfortable ideas that challenge long-held assumptions about English Language Arts. They force us to talk about resonance5 and efficacy and technology and neuroplasticity, among many other elements. It’s far simpler to build a straw man — or an English kind of Scotsman — than to grapple with, e.g., Graham’s logic, which forced me many years ago to realize that a syllabus in the Humanities might need to look different.
(It might also be worth a moment’s consideration that the straw man built from my desire to teach literature differently doesn’t really match up with, you know, the guy who was interviewed in Harper’s.)
The Hydra
A much trickier rumor, and the impetus for this post, is that I don’t give students feedback on their writing. That one pops up every so often, especially during periods of high student stress, and especially if I am absent for any length of time6. Using an assessment system like grade abatement dislocates a lot of student expectations, too, But one of the biggest reasons that this feedback rumor rears its head again and again, like history’s least-informed hydra, is that it’s true. Sort of.
Over the past 5-6 years, I’ve torn down and rebuilt the way I give feedback, using the same iterative framework I use for everything else in the classroom. It’s makerspace thinking, which is outlined in the syllabus I linked to before, and which is exactly what I ask students to do. Instead of trying to make the old system faster or more efficient, I started thinking about new systems. I began looking at how feedback works in real-world situations. I tested ideas, learned from their failures, and ended up with this:
That post, as it explores the different facets of the system of feedback here in Room 210, seems to dispel the rumor that I don’t give feedback. The problem is that it does this by questioning the very nature of feedback, including how a classroom is structured and where the onus for learning rests. So it’s complicated. It takes time to understand. Reading all of the ramiform hyperlinks alone would require more time and attention than most of spend on anything online, even when it’s demanded of us, and that’s well before we look at other connected and helpful instructional posts.
Still, Sisyphus is our mascot for a reason. Here are other connected and helpful instructional posts about feedback:
(1) Directional Discomfort | The “open hand” section is the key, as it details the more ameliorative aspect of the feedback system. The whole post is itself an example of feedback, too, and it’s actually an archive of performative feedback — that very teacher-centric, front-of-the-classroom, dark-clouds-gathering kind of feedback that I used to give. That stuff, like most traditional feedback, is more about the teacher than the student. It has its place, but I don’t think that place is at the center of the learning environment.
(2) The Enigma of Grade Abatement | One of many feedback posts — part and parcel of the course, to paraphrase Emerson7 — that concerns itself with the end of a grade-abated period of study. This one talks explicitly about how feedback works, what kind of agency students have in their learning, and how transparent the system tries to be.
(3) Molecular Learning | An extended analogy used to introduce the philosophy of the course (and to teach extended analogies by modeling one). That philosophy is centered on how an expert cook/writer/learner might differentiate instruction for students of differing abilities and interests. It also argues, like most everything I write for students, that learning is about flexibility and advocacy and taking risks.
(4) “Observe, question, explore, reflect.” | This offers a deeper look at how the feedback process functions during a “real” assignment, but the reason to read it is the essay on preschool crafts embedded early on. Dahl articulates why we should shift feedback away from product toward process, because it forces us to examine the purpose of the work. Are we after a perfect essay, made perfect through rigorous dissection and revision and resubmission? Do we want to act as editors8 who strip away all the authenticity of the writing until it’s just about what we think? Or are we after a process that can travel with a student?
(5) Tilting at Windmills | The TL;DR is the most important part, because it mentions feedback in two of the three basic components of successful learning. Work ethic is the first component, but the other two are about interacting with new forms of feedback and instruction, working with peers, and “goal-oriented feedback looping with the teacher.” In other words, feedback only works when it is a circuit. Break the circuit (e.g., by never talking to the teacher or reading instructional posts like this one), and the feedback dies — just like it would if the student didn’t read comments on an essay or zoned out during a lecture. The major difference in this course? The student starts the loop, not the teacher.
There are many, many more examples of developing and deepening these ideas, and for every generalized post (like this looped work on organization and self-awareness), there are dozens of examples of proxy, radial, and individual feedback during the class period itself — a period identified early and often as more important than any other part of the feedback loop. The interstitial stuff was created as part of an “anywhere, anytime” learning environment, but the idea of interstitial learning means that everything is feedback, or at least is intended to be feedback.
An Example
AP exam prep began in January with a front-loaded look at exams and our first practice essay. Three months later, students began their individual preparations through this final, organizing post. Part of that post and its in-class counterpart was feedback on multiple-choice data, including analysis of various patterns in the AP sections, and a drill-down discussion into the resources provided to each student for their last few weeks of interstitial prep.
That’s a lot of looped feedback and student-centered learning. It took a long time to stagger it out to students without overwhelming them, too. And it’s why I was able to dedicate an entire period on Wednesday, May 3, to one student and one student only. Her 30+ peers were left to their own devices, and after an initial conversation about what to work on, she was given feedback on a rhetorical analysis essay from 8:50 until 9:15. To continue the snapshot of Room 210:
She and I sat at a desk with her response to Question 2 of the practice AP exam we are studying. In front of us, we had her metacognitive notes on the writing process, the samples provided by the College Board, and my notes. We had other resources, including the many guides prepared for each section of the exam (here’s the one for that prompt), up on the computer screen next to us.
And then we talked. I marked up the essay, offering suggestions on universal elements like approach and style, and more specific feedback on blending quotations and arranging ideas through transitions of logic. The student took notes, asked questions, and clarified her next steps.
Certainly every student would gain something from just such a conference. Not many advocate for themselves as that student did, but that’s not surprising; what is surprising, at least to me, is that I would not want them all to advocate like that. Replacing handwritten commentary with conferences is functionally no different in terms of teacher-centered learning. There is a better way.
Because this student left our meeting ready to teach. She knows that her GAP score depends on her ability to transfer knowledge, to embrace the Protégé Effect, and to be collaborative and metacognitive; shifting the burden of feedback boosts her final score, boosts her understanding, improves her eventual performance on whatever high-stakes game waits for her, and boosts the understanding of her peers. If that instructional essay on feedback is the blueprint for what we do, this student’s efforts on May 3 are the product: Radial and proxy feedback that helps the individual and the group. Anything else is a ramshackle attempt to do the old thing more effectively or efficiently.
In the Wind
This is a lot to take in, sure. It’s a paradigm shift. If it didn’t require a lot of study and research and effort to understand, it would just be another flashy and ultimately meaningless attempt at “reform,” and our demand for simplicity borders on cynicism. Catchphrases and soundbites and aphorisms actively prevent education from evolving, in fact; it’s a complex system, and it takes complex thinking to fix it. Perseverating about “grit” and “creativity” and how students are staring at their iPads all day isn’t helping them to learn better, and neither is giving feedback exactly like teachers did in 1987.
What ought to stand out clearly, if you’ve made it this far, is the constant layering of meaning. You should see an ongoing, evolving conversation about feedback that is, itself, often a part of feedback. Everything is connected, and the mechanisms are all transparent; therefore, if you invest in the system, you’ll understand it, which is why there are so many students reading this right now and thinking, “This doesn’t apply to me,” without an ounce of Dunning-Kruger denial. Their understanding took hard work, and they know it.
Of course, the folks who need the information in this post often don’t read these posts, or don’t read them all that well. They’ll pick up on the occasional frustration or sarcasm9 and skip right over the good stuff. And that was a serious flaw — I knew I was preaching to the choir, but I kept singing like I wanted to burst some alveoli — until I started printing posts, making photocopies, distributing paper, and teaching the lesson in small groups. We’ve done that, I’d guess, 25 or 30 times this year? We’ll do it again with this one, forcing even the most reticent readers to grapple with this kind of flipped lecture. And that’s during a year when we had every intention of going paperless.
Students receive feedback, is the point. They create their own, too, which requires the kind of uncomfortable metacognition I invite everyone reading this to do — and that means everybody. I don’t know anyone, myself included, who wouldn’t benefit from looking with clear but sympathetic eyes at the person in the mirror. I welcome the feedback that comes from that introspection. I welcome all feedback, in fact, because that’s the maker mentality: to collaborate and innovate and problem-solve together.
There’s just one thing to keep in mind: You are entitled, as Harlan Ellison once said, only to an informed opinion. That’s an opinion informed by research and discussion and knowledge and perspective. You are entitled to that opinion. Opinions that are uninformed or misinformed or drawn from an echo chamber that just repeats everything you already believe? You’re not entitled to that. You can have one of those uninformed opinions, sure, but it has about as much worth, to paraphrase Ellison again, as a bit of methane in the wind.
It was also my birthday, which I mention in order to help you imagine the scene. Candles are lit, the children are singing, but everyone sounds like they’ve been smoking for 50 years and looks roughly like a zombie that’s been through a 12-round fight. ↩
It’s the existential piece that really gets to them. ↩
This quite literally happened once. It’s amazing the perspective you develop while elevated on a stretcher. ↩
I was never challenged to a rap battle, though. It feels like a missed teaching opportunity. Or it would, if I had actually been an underground rapper and DJ. Who can know such things? ↩
Including Northrop Frye’s definition of it, which really ought to inform every so-called “assured experience” we give in literature. The canon can’t be unassailable, but it exists for a reason; and having an open mind about it isn’t some kind of pedagogical blasphemy. ↩
Another snapshot: I missed an entire week one year because of severe recurrent corneal erosion, which means my cornea split in half. I couldn’t see for a week or so, and that recurred three or four times, which meant a system without this new kind of feedback would have collapsed completely. ↩
Like using Edwards’ “Sinners” to talk about disappointment, using Emerson is a transparent attempt to model what reading and allusive thinking looks like, not just what it theoretically might look like if students were more like literature professors. In that same essay, Emerson wrote that “[t]he greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.” So I use it. ↩
I had a colleague once say, “I missed my calling as a copyeditor,” and that’s exactly it: We develop the skills we need, and if we treat student writing as an artifact to be cleaned up and presented, we become copyeditors, not mentors. ↩
Which is being left in as another transparent kind of teaching-by-doing. Sarcasm has its place, and that place is probably when the writer has to explain something he’s explained dozens of times already to a group that has no business remaining ignorant. It’s like watching someone try to force a vinyl record into a CD player. That calls for some sarcasm. ↩