Learning Design: Feedback and Feedforward
I’ve been teaching a class about Assessment and Evaluation as part of the Graduate Certificate in Learning Design at the moment. It’s the first time I’ve taught the subject since I designed it, and 4 weeks in, I’m reasonably pleased with how it’s going. We recently did a session all about giving feedback – which I hav always felt is something to which more attention should be paid, especially in initial teacher education, where I do much of my teaching. For some reason, it’s often limited to some rough notes and tips on what is good feedback and some strategies to give it – e.g. two stars and a wish, or hamburger feedback. While this is a good start, I think that feedback is probably one fo the most important skills a teacher can develop, and I think having an understanding of how feedback works and how educators might effectively use it is almost as important for learning designers – after all, as many others have pointed out, feedback is at its most effective when it is planned for – ideally long before the assessment task is submitted!
Anyway, the question came up about the difference between feedback and feed forward. I’m conscious that, as best as I can make out, this is either a semantic difference – but perhaps an important one, or an idea that has already been covered, depending on what meaning you apply. Feedforward, as I understand it, is essentially what might have been once called – and still is, if you ask me – formative feedback. That is, it is feedback given with the intention of improving future performance, especially in similar or related endeavours. The semantic argument is that this is done to highlight the need for it to be future focused – that it, given tot he learner not to provide a summative evaluation or judgement, but to guide them to improvement future efforts. So, two sides of a very similar coin, at the least.
So what’s my problem with the term feedforward. Firstly, as one of my students pointed out, there’s a kind of avian ugliness about the word itself. Regardless of that, I don’t like the term because I think that it ignores the learner – or at least marginalises them – in the feedback process. My belief is that feedback should be done with (not to) the learner; that is, their involvement in the process is essential, and that is what the ‘back’ means. Good feedback should always be constructive, and depending on the purpose of giving the feedback, it may very well suggest way to improve future performance – but the most important part of it is the communication between the educator and the learner – and that is what the ‘back’ part entails.