Feedback: Through a Communications Model

Let me draw on my communications background to talk about feedback. The earliest model of communication (Linear Model) depicted communication as something one person does to another: The sender has a thought; she encodes it into a message; she sends it through a channel; the receiver decodes it. Done. 

The Interactive Model improved our visualization of the communication process by acknowledging that people act as both senders and receivers. This added the concept of FEEDBACK to the model. 

However, the Transactional Model is better yet. Rather than labeling senders and receivers, the model identifies "participants" who are both sending and receiving multiple messages--through multiple channels--simultaneously. Feedback is no longer isolated as a separate action.

I prefer to think of student-teacher interactions using the Transactional Model. All interactions (even silence) carry meaning when people come together in shared space. Feedback is not something turned on and off like a faucet. It is more like fog--all around us (on little cat feet...I told you I was prone to unsolicited blurts of poetry--).

As a teacher I of course plan deliberate written and oral responses to my students' efforts. I realize that response is most often called "feedback." However, it is good to be reminded that the way I lift an eyebrow, interrupt, slump my shoulders, use an idiom, smile, or raise my voice are all sending messages to my students about their their learning, their capabilities, and their worth in my classroom. The way they smile, slump, blurt, yawn and respond is in turn sending me messages about my teaching--and my students' attitudes and needs.  

Listening to these messages sensitively, with awareness, and adjusting accordingly is perhaps the most exhausting part of teaching. And perhaps the most important. 

Day 14: What is feedback for learning, and how well do you give it to students?

Reflection: Oh my. I came so close to not posting tonight. I'm not ready for tomorrow. Must get ready for a sub...finish reading and responding to essays...Forcing myself to blog every day is teaching me more about myself than about writing.