Sub Ubi

This past autumn I taught Software Design at Olin College. It was an excellent experience, and I enjoyed myself a great deal. As I was experimenting with a number of things (a transition from material found in HtDP to an OO introduction to GUI programming, pair programming, the use of version control with novice programmers, extended projects in a first programming course, etc.), I was very interested in getting good feedback regarding how the course went. Translated, I mean “better feedback than a bog-standard feedback form would yield.”

I often close my courses with a discussion as to how the course went. This year, I took the results of the 45 minute discussion that the students and I had, and reflected on how I might evolve the course the next time I teach it. I then pushed those reflections (4 pages of summary and 10 pages of reflection) back to the students, asking for them to verify whether they felt my proposed changes captured the spirit of their comments and criticisms. Of the 20 in the class, 6 came back to me with their thoughts.

I have now consolidated my proposed changes and the student comments into one document. I’ve titled it Feedback as a conversation (PDF, 5MB), and have made it available online (if you are interested… mostly, this is so I can point students and colleagues at it). Based on a quick poke around the literature, I’m curious whether the notion of “feedback as conversations” (in the spirit of the Cluetrain Manifesto) has made its way into the academic discourse. I may try and dig through this literature, as I have never actually seen anyone go through this kind of iterative, reflective process with their students before. Certainly, it is outside my experience at Kenyon, Indiana, and Kent.

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