The Main Course: Feedback

Borrowing from the wisdom of engineering: An education system is first of all just that - a system: A bunch of entities (students, teachers, schools, government, ...) which together form one entity that has some meaning for humans. The main expected output from the education system are the graduates, who have the skills to function in - and contribute to - society. Every education system is a complex system.

Let's consider a much simpler system - a washing machine: The machine needs to be filled with water in order to start washing. It could be done by opening the incoming water-pipe for a specified time, but then, if the water pressure is lower than we guessed, the machine won't be sufficiently filled; If the water pressure is higher than we guessed, the machine will overflow. We wouldn't think of using a guess. We would use a mechanism that will open the water pipe for just enough time to fill the water tank, but not enough time to cause a flood. We would use a float valve as a feedback mechanism to control the water flow. A system without feedback - an open-loop system - can only deal with expected and pre-analyzed circumstances. It would go haywire as soon as anything interesting happens in its environment.

The first half of the premise for this post is that education systems are by nature complex, and any complex system needs clever feedback loops in order to keep it running. In the case of an education system, part of the aforementioned "running" must be "adapting" and "improving", which requires even more sophisticated feedback loops. The second half of the premise is that most education systems function largely without feedback, or with the wrong feedback loops. Haywire is the steady state.

We can - and should - fill several books with specific discussions of the types of feedback necessary for a good education system, but for now I will just list a few domains for feedback mechanisms.

General:

• Measure what is deemed important, not what's easy to measure
• E.g., quizzes, research
• Get over the fear that being measured means being judged and damned
• Reward desirable behavior to build desirable habits
• Example desirable behavior: Success in personal assignments; Contribution to peers, to pupils and ward in general, to the system
• Example rewards: public recognition, inclusion in desirable work
• Not counter-productive rewards such as being allowed to play/vacation instead of study/work, which send the message that study/work is undesirable
• Penalize undesirable behavior to reverse undesirable habits
• E.g., private admonition, exclusion from desirable work
• Accountability - remove from a position where one causes harm
• Clearly separated from penalty
• The removal is public, not private and hushed
• Peer Review - less threatening, more economical and sends a positive message
• Percolation
• Mechanisms must be maintained for real-life information and insight to bubble upwards from students to teachers to principals to local governments to central education establishment
• Mechanisms must be maintained for research-based information and insight to seep downwards from central education establishment to principals to teachers to students
• Incentives determine behavior - Rewards and penalties must be in tune with the goals of the system

Students:

• Measurement
• E.g., skills more than crammed knowledge
• Reward
• E.g., for making a significant effort to learn
• E.g., for success in learning, as measured
• Penalty
• E.g., for doing slipshod work
• Accountability
• E.g., a student who disrupts the classes can be removed from a lesson, and even from the school
• Peer Review by other students
• Same age, older

Teachers:

• Measurement
• E.g., video-record classes, to allow later analysis
• Reward
• E.g., for students earning rewards
• Penalty
• E.g., for students receiving penalties
• Accountability
• E.g., a teacher who performs poorly must be removed from the position of harming the system and students
• Peer Review
• Teachers should talk more amongst themselves about problems, successes and failures. Engineers do that a lot

School Management:

• Measurement, Reward, Penalty, Accountability, Peer Review

Local government education officials:

• Measurement, Reward, Penalty, Accountability, Peer Review

Central government education officials:

• Measurement, Reward, Penalty, Accountability, Peer Review

Teacher Education establishment

• Measurement, Reward, Penalty, Accountability, Peer Review

Far-from-bottom line:

The mess of bullet-points above can be used as a minimal skeleton for looking into the issue of feedback. Existing research needs to be studied; existing thinking needs to be reviewed; more work is necessary to formulate a suggested structure and connections between the different stakeholders in the education establishment. The existing education systems need to be gradually improved towards the ideal. The ideal will often turn out (based on research) to have been wrong, and will have to be revised. Hopefully, with the right feedback loops, the system will tend to keep improving.

Just to make sure I don't sound too cheery: With the wrong feedback loops, any system will tend to fall apart.