This month’s issue of our department’s newsletter, The DL Digest (subscribe here!) continued our exploration of SPS’ High Impact Teaching practices, focusing on feedback.
We asked four distance learning team members to share their favorite feedback styles with us, and challenged our readers to match the staffer with the feedback philosophy.
Read on to see if your guess was correct and learn more about action-oriented feedback, glow and grow, start, stop, keep doing, and feedforwarding.
Feedforwarding
Learning Designer Angela Xiong
Angela says, “My favorite is feedforwarding – offering advice on what to do next time, rather than just focusing on what was done wrong. Everyone makes mistakes but how can we learn from it? This way, we can keep the feedback forward-looking and action-oriented instead of dwelling on past mistakes. Also, the tone and language you use should be sincere and acceptable.”
Yale University offers a simple framework for a feedforwarding conversation.
Action-Oriented Feedback
Senior Instructional Learning & Accessibility Specialist Christine Scherer
Christine tells us, “What I find most important about feedback is to provide some kind of action to take in response. That action can be simple–please review/revise is a comment note I leave!–or more complicated, but it’s still important to give people guidance about the next steps that are needed in response to the feedback.”
Action-oriented feedback supports Universal Design for Learning, and CAST provides some specific tips to consider when offering this type of feedback to students.
Glow and Grow
Learning Designer Lynn Healy
Lynn says, “Glow and grow feedback is something I use in my developments with instructors, in my courses when I teach, and with my kids (and husband!). I think the name speaks for itself, but I always try to identify strengths/solid work or contributions from the person and then address an area of growth or improvement.”
Glow and Grow from Tools for Thoughtful Assessments sheds more light (pun intended!) on the process behind glow and grow feedback.
Start, Stop, Keep Doing
Learning Designer Heather Brown
Heather tells us, “I like to use this tool: Start, Stop, Keep Doing. I’ve done this many times in teaching, which is to ask learners to answer these prompts when we’re wrapping up a course: 1)Something I would like you to START doing is… 2)Something I would like you to STOP doing is… 3) Something I would like you to CONTINUE doing is…”
In a blog post for OneHE, Maha Bali of American University in Cairo, Egypt provides several specific examples of implementing the start, stop, keep doing feedback framework.