On constructive feedback

We just kicked off a pilot project in the TUT Language Centre, The Writing Clinic. The main activity of this project involves individualised feedback to writers about their manuscripts. Now that high quality writing instruction is available for free online, it increasingly feels feedback is my raison d'etre as teacher. Whether our clients see it that way, remains to be seen. To convince students of the importance of feedback, I have often pulled out this line by Verlyn Klinkenborg: "When called to the stand in the court of meaning, your sentences will get no coaching from you. They'll say exactly what their words say, and if it makes you look ridiculous or confused, guess what?" I am here, in the worst case, to save you from ridiculousness and, in the best, to help you close the small gap between what is in your head and what is on your paper. But what sort of feedback actually helps you bridge that gap?

So let's imagine you are coming to me for a writing consultation, which sort of comment would you prefer as feedback:

A."This is a great first draft. Keep going!"

B. "I find your opening paragraph confusing." (paragraph circled in bright red)

C. "I think you write some precise individual sentences here at the beginning but I find the whole first paragraph to be unfocused. I like the next one though :)"

D. "I believe you can develop this paragraph further. What if you would add a first sentence where you introduce all the studies your are discussing and then use enumeration in the following sentences--first...second...finally--to help the reader link each of the problems you list about this area of research back to the first sentence? See this for an example: http://sana.tkk.fi/awe/cohesion/topsen/enum/index.html"

I would choose D, but let's not dismiss the other possibilities too quickly. Wouldn't you agree there are some situations in which choice A would be preferable? For example, if you are in your first weeks of beginning Russian and you are utterly confused by the large number of hissing silibants (zh, ts, ch, sh, and sh'), you probably wouldn't appreciate your teacher commenting, "I find your use of these sounds confusing." You want to feel you are getting at least one of them right! Studies looking at what feedback is appreciated at different levels of attainment (also see here) show, unsurprisingly, that beginners mostly want encouragment. When able to choose between flavors of teacher, beginning students will prefer a teacher who notices what we do well rather than our mistakes (in one study, a French teacher). Experts, on the other hand, often embrace and seek out negative feedback. Incidentally, I have learned that choice A is always the best if the person you are giving feedback to happens to be your mother-in-law.

I confess feedback type B has been my own vice as a teacher, having followed in the footsteps of  my own first English teachers. I have literally penned thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of comments that fall in this category. While these red splashes of alarm may actually work for a percentage of highly motivated learners undeterred by the occasional vagueness and sheer burden of so many things being incorrect, for many others I have noticed it has no effect or even does more harm than good in the revisions. I suppose there are two problems here: first, the inability to translate the wide comment or red mark into a satisfying fix and, more deeply, the fragileness of the psychological ground on which rests the relationship between feedback giver and receiver. In regard to the latter trust problem, I vividly recall a childhood tennis coach shaking his head in disgust every time I did one of my floppy serves. Yeah, I understood I was doing something wrong alright. But, in my case, I really needed a tip or two. At first I felt guilty for disappointing him, then I began to distrust his motives as my coach, and finally I quit tennis. A body of research on revision of essays in response to teacher feedback by minority writers in the US show how type B feedback may encourage those of us who are less resilient to give up on trying, precisely because we don't feel that the teacher actually believes in our potential. This is even more likely if the teacher and student are from different social, economic or ethnic backgrounds. All that said, there are some well-loved teachers out there (think Russian ice skating coach) who practice tough love all the time. Still, in spite of the toughness, it is felt as love.

Many of us have actually been trained to employ so-called hamburger feedback, which is represented in example C. You try to offset the sting of the bad news by sandwiching it between some good news. Again, such feedback may have its uses, particulary when it is news we are talking about, like you didn't get the job or your mother-in-law is visiting for a month. However, do we really need to confuse things by inserting a judgement in our feedback, framing every comment as negative or positive? The fact that a sentence could be written differently to suit a different audience is not really a good or bad fact about the world. It is simply a possibility. Moreover, there is evidence that we might actually mislead students about their abilities, if we constantly try to sugar our feedback with good news. After all, if the sentences are good, and the next paragraph is fine, maybe it's already good enough.

This brings me to possibility D in which the feedback seems to do three things: 1. he or she expresses belief in the writers potential to develop (the extent to which this is taken as genuine by the receiver may have to do with a number of other behind the scenes facts about the relationship), 2. a specific strategy is suggested together with a link to an example, although it is not presented as the one correct answer, and 3. it is formed as an experiment (i.e., what if) without judgement. It is a potential solution one could adopt or reject. In closing it should be mentioned that such feedback takes a lot of effort, and in all honesty, we may not have more than a feeling something is amis in someone's writing but not a strategy to offer; occasionally we are ridiculous and confused together.