On Feedback

Lou Spaventa, US

“Pete Townshend was … the one…who made…feedback…his style.”

Jimmy Page

On April 6, 1968 at the Fillmore East, I saw Pete Townshend raise up his white Fender Stratocaster guitar, turn towards his bank of Marshall amplifiers, and get some godawful screams to come out of them. He used his guitar and his body to manipulate the feedback, much like an orchestra conductor. Then he proceeded to tomahawk his guitar through the amplifiers and smash that beautiful Strat into pieces on the stage floor. One thought I had at the time was that as a working class student and struggling rock guitarist, I couldn’t afford the equipment he so casually destroyed. Another thought was, “Wow! Feedback is powerful!” And so it is.

Through the popularity of talk therapy and cognitive psychology in the post-war era, feedback became part of the educational loop: teach, test, get feedback; then repeat the process. We find a similar paradigm in experiential learning: experience, process the experience, modulate behavior; then repeat the process again. Later on, the second piece in this cycle, processing the experience, became the abiding concern of many; it was most commonly called reflection. Student teachers at the School for International Training, where I studied and later taught, were instructed to reflect before a lesson in order to see what resources and assumptions they brought to bear on the content of the lesson. They were instructed to reflect as learning was taking place in order to understand what was happening. They were instructed to reflect after a lesson in order to assess what had happened. Mostly this was done through written reflection. Donald A. Schon’s 1983 book, The Reflective Practitioner, was the seminal text on reflective practice, but many more followed. In the field of TESOL, such writers as Claire Stanley, Carol R. Rodgers, Donald Freeman and Jack Richards have published on reflective teaching. Reflective teaching became the dominant methodology at the School for International Training. The content of reflection for the classroom teacher was his or her practice and the feedback of the students. This could be handled through such techniques as videotaping, interviews, and journaling. One way in which reflection became more like typical talk therapy was that it sought to get to the root of teacher beliefs and assumptions about human nature as well as learning, and teaching. It, incidentally, aimed at the same for students: What are their assumptions about learning? About good teaching?

Back to Pete Townshend. In most cases, guitarists try to avoid feedback. It is, after all, unwanted sound. Townshend made feedback work for him. Analogously, traditional teaching did not emphasize feedback from students because, to use Paolo Freire’s term, the educational model employed was the “banking” model of education, wherein a teacher with knowledge made deposits into the empty account of student knowledge. This thinking about teaching was consonant with behavioral psychology and the audio-lingual approach to language teaching, which dominated the post WWII era and which treated the student as tabula rasa, a blank slate with no prior knowledge. Things have changed in education. Most teachers are trained to elicit feedback from students at some point in a lesson and a course. This is especially true for the field of language teaching. Methods such as the Silent Way and Community Language Learning depend upon learner feedback to construct lessons. In recent times, student feedback has become a major component of instruction in all fields of study. For example, at our school, Santa Barbara City College, students are given a set of “student learning outcomes,” overarching objectives for a course in which they are enrolled. Instructors seek feedback from students to learn whether students believe that they are attaining these outcomes (formative evaluation) and whether they have attained these outcomes by course end (summative evaluation). Over the years, I have collected dozens of feedback forms from students that, in part, guide me in creating the next iteration of a particular course. Students themselves seek feedback from those who have taken courses from me and from all the other instructors at our college through sites such as “Rate Your Professor.” I don’t look at such sites, partly because I would dwell on anything I perceived as negative and partly because I don’t trust the information on the site. Why not trust it?

The reason I am not sanguine about the value of student on-line evaluation of instructor teaching is the same reason I resist making feedback the sole indicator of change for me: I don’t believe that the response of a student or a group of students is valid for more than the moment it is given. It is, by nature, ephemeral, and open to the influence of many different variables. At some point, the professor must profess, that is, teach to the truth as he or she knows it without fear of negative feedback and its outcome. There is an inherently unequal relationship between the classroom instructor and the student. If there were not, there would be no relationship between them at all. Perhaps a good analogy is the relationship between master and apprentice. The apprentice agrees to suspend judgment of the master until he or she learns all that the master has to offer. At that point, when the apprentice has attained the skills of the master, feedback becomes powerful, whether positive or negative. Until that point, feedback is one more guidepost on the road that the teacher has chosen to follow. To ignore it is to be ignorant of the every day reality of the classroom and the experience of students in that classroom. To embrace it totally is to lose one’s identity and individuality, and furthermore, to create a misunderstanding about the nature of teaching and learning. Teaching and learning is not based upon a client-customer relationship as many educational administrators would have it. The customer is not always right if he or she is the student in the classroom. Learning is an unequal partnership in which instructor and student come together to study subject matter of which the instructor is the master and the student the novice. The skill with which the instructor guides the student in learning is the true measure of his or her teaching for any particular lesson or for any particular course. Such skill is not binary: it is not the case that it is either present or absent. The skill of guiding students in learning fluctuates from class to class and course to course. One hopes that there is always some learning inherent in the event, but that might not be the case if one party or the other, teacher or student, has closed off to the experience and has removed himself or herself from the teacher-student relationship. This can and does happen. I remember some years ago teaching a course in educational research at a small college in North Carolina. There was a young woman in the course who had a very strong reaction to me and kept herself apart from the work of the class and from contact with me. Finally, one day she found the courage to tell me that I reminded her of someone she had encountered who had posed a threat to her in some way.
She, therefore, declined to participate in the class. If my memory serves me, in the end, she dropped the course.

I also remember many years ago as a Peace Corps teacher in the Republic of Korea I was teaching from a textbook given to me in training, one that was totally devoid of interest for me and for my students. I was not engaged and neither were they. I doubt that much good came out of that class for those students. I know I took away nothing of importance save the vague feeling that something hadn’t worked very well.

So feedback is solid. It is slippery. It is useful. It is harmful. It is flattering. It is damning. It is representational. It is idiosyncratic. It is a tool best employed consistently with a clear understanding of its potential and its limitations. It is part of every teacher’s consciousness, yet its meaning is not always clear. The difference between Pete Townshend’s use of feedback and unwanted feedback is the difference between understanding and creating as against ignoring and repeating something thoughtlessly. What we don’t control controls us, at least to the extent that we don’t learn from it. Not to learn is not to change, and not to change is not to be alive as a teacher. In the end, we need to master feedback to use it effectively as a tool for good teaching.

Please check the Train the Trainer course at Pilgrims website.