Write your own read before you hear theirs

Before feedback arrives, record your own assessment so their view lands as information beside yours, not a verdict that replaces it.

Pourquoi ça marche

In the 2001 study, learners with a Socializing way of knowing could sense when they had learned something but needed the teacher to confirm it before it counted; the early sign of growth the researchers describe is beginning to see the teacher’s perspective and expectations as separate from one’s own. Writing your assessment first gives that half-felt internal sense a form that exists before anyone else’s view, so there are two views to compare instead of one to absorb. It also keeps attention on the work itself rather than on what the feedback says about you.

Comment faire

1. Before a review, a grade, or anyone’s reaction to something you made, write three lines: what you think worked, what you think did not, and how sure you are.
2. When their feedback arrives, write it in a second column, in their words where you can.
3. Mark where the two agree, where they differ, and where theirs shows you something you had not seen.
4. For each difference, decide what you now think — theirs, yours, or a third view — and write down your reason.

Données probantes

The finding that Socializing learners needed a teacher’s acknowledgement to validate their own sense of learning, and that growth showed up as seeing the teacher’s expectations as separate from their own, comes from Kegan’s group (NCSALL, 2001). Kluger and DeNisi’s meta-analysis of 607 effect sizes found that feedback improved performance on average but decreased it in over a third of cases, and that feedback worked less well as attention moved away from the task and toward the self — which is why the exercise anchors your own judgment in the work. (observational)

Kluger and DeNisi studied how feedback affects task performance, not developmental stage; the link to the socialized mind is by reasoning, and the two-column exercise itself has not been tested.

Sources

• Kegan, R., Broderick, M., Drago-Severson, E., Helsing, D., Popp, N., & Portnow, K. (2001). Toward a New Pluralism in ABE/ESOL Classrooms: Teaching to Multiple “Cultures of Mind.” Executive Summary, NCSALL Reports #19a. Harvard Graduate School of Education / National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy.
• Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254–284.

Erreur fréquente

Writing a self-assessment that is really a guess at what they will say. If your first column predicts their verdict, you have only moved the authority earlier; it has to be what you actually think, even when you are unsure.