Funny Feedback

Flat Christine (Educ 809)

One of the biggest challenges with my dissertation is DISEMBEDDING myself from what I write. With four proposal submissions comes four opportunities for feedback:

• Get out of the problem.  The dissertation is not the problem.
• It’s not political.  It’s not about union vs. management.
• It’s not about you.  Excuse me?  It’s not about me?
• Make it academic.  It’s not a blog.  Ouch.  That hurts.

You can see why I am a bit fearful of future feedback and have become tentative with my writing.  This spring I am enrolled with the Certificate of University Teaching and Learning (CUTL) at SFU.  This program provides an interesting perspective on teaching and learning.  I am the only participant this session who is from the Faculty of Education and has more than ten years experience teaching.  A requirement of CUTL is the Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW).  I took ISW last summer which transformational my teaching practice.  CUTL has also influence how I perceive teaching and learning.  With CUTL and ISW, I have gone through great lengths to disembed myself from my writing for the past few years.  My research topic is inspired from a problem in the workplace.  Personally, I found it difficult to stay in the teaching profession while writing my dissertation proposal and achieve the first three bullets as mentioned above.  Now I am trying to write out my ideas in edu-academic speak.  It’s been challenging.  This brings me to my funny feedback.  For CUTL, participants are required to write a literature review about teaching and learning in higher education.  I wrote about ISW and how it could be used as a framework for professional development for K-12 mathematics teachers.  I used some of my resources from my dissertation proposal for this literature review.  My greatest concern was flow, coherence, and disembedding myself from my writing.  After the rough draft submission, participants of CUTL are divided up into small groups to present their literature review to peer and receive formative feedback on presentation skills and content.  Here is my feedback from last week:

• You seem comfortable presenting to the group with good motion and gestures; very natural.
• You have given a good rationale why to implement ISW as a framework for professional development.
• You did not quite achieve the intended learning outcomes of the literature review assignment.
• Your next step is to write about implementation and how I would use it as a teacher.

Pardon me?  I need to include myself in the writing?  Now that’s funny.  You don’t get a true sense of how you are doing unless someone tells you.  It’s like looking at a mirror.  This is what formative feedback is all about.  This is what my CUTL literature review tries to emphasize.  This is what I wish for with my dissertation process.  Feedback matters.