Harvard recently published a study about teachers who text parents a brief message about improvements that a student can make. Continuous feedback is so powerful that it improves drop out rates and will increase the likelihood of improvement substantially.
Instead of doing biannual report cards, giving parents a 1 minute feedback talk or a 2 sentence text will substantially improve student development. Many teachers, including my past self, give students report cards to show how they are progressing over time and as great as this seems, it’s less powerful than continuous feedback. It also takes a lot of time.
Most of the time in education, the feedback loop should be as short as possible. In a perfect education model, students would receive instant feedback about their progress all the time. This would help them improve at exponential rates, but this is not possible – yet. Most teachers provide feedback once a week, but what if feedback could be everyday from friends, other parents or studiomates?
The goal should be to raise the status of your students – to level them up in some way: focus, emotional intelligence, communication. These improvements come with every interaction and making the feedback as often as possible (through text, email, or after lessons) reintroduces challenges and promotes exponential student learning.
JT