FEEDFORWARD an identity

Latha Vydianathan

As teachers, we give feedback pretty much all day long. We tell our students how they can improve on assignments, we praise them for the things they’re doing well, we correct their incorrect responses, and we redirect them when they behave in ways that aren’t helpful to learning.

And that’s just the students. We also give feedback to our colleagues, although in most cases, these exchanges don’t happen as often or as freely as they probably should. And we encourage our students to give feedback to each other, however with rather uneven results. Really, the experience of school could be described as one long feedback session, where every day, one group of people show up with the goal of improving, while other people tell them how to do it.

It doesn’t always go well. As we give and receive feedback, people get defensive. Feelings are hurt. Too often, the improvements we’re hoping for don’t happen, because the feedback isn’t given in a way that the receiver can embrace it.

It turns out there’s a different way to give feedback that works a lot better, a way of flipping its focus from the past to the future. It’s a concept called “feedforward,” which was originally developed by a management expert named Marshall Goldsmith. As far as I can tell, not a lot of us are familiar with the practice of feedforward, and I really think if we learned how to do it and started using it more consistently, it could make a huge difference to how we grow as professionals.

When we give feedback to our students, or when our co-workers or administrators give feedback to us, the focus is on the past. “People can’t control what they can’t change, and we can’t change the past. And that happens to be the focus of most of the feedback that we give or receive.”

When we give feedforward, instead of rating and judging a person’s performance in the past, we focus on their development in the future.

Suppose my student is writing an essay. Instead of waiting until she is finished, then marking up all the errors and giving it a grade, I would read parts of the essay while she is writing it, point out things I’m noticing, and ask her questions to get her thinking about how she might improve it. There’s nothing simple or straightforward about telling people how to improve, so let us pause and look at ourselves as not just who we are but who we are becoming. Follow the acronym

REPAIR (regenerate, expand, particular, authentic, impact, refine)
When we receive feedback, which often doesn’t yield the desired results, it shuts down our mental dashboards. Feedforward, on the other hand, regenerates talent. To give insights while a task is being carried out helps expand possibilities producing newer and better ideas. Being particularly specific about the areas of improvement while an assignment is in progress allows the students to enact and process the feedforward right away. Provideing authentic feedforward not only helps improve ideas but also creates a positive impact on a task as absorption happens immediately. Refining a task before completion increases a sense of self-esteem creating confident students. Following the feedforward approach for better results helps students to not see themselves as who they are but to see themselves as what they are becoming.

The author is the Primary Coordinator at Delhi School of Excellence, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad. She can be reached at latha.vydianathan@yahoo.com.