Tag Archives: Feedback

Let the Light In

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My latest academic piece is a chapter in an edited book on women in academia.  It’s incredibly personal and was very difficult to write.

The struggle I had with writing this piece differed from my normal struggles because it brought me back to a series of  intense times that started in my late adolescence, with the loss of my mother, and continued through my early career, with the adoption and health concerns of my older children. These are events that I generally try to forget, even though they shaped (and continue to shape) my career and my life in important ways. They remind me of very dark days, days which often made me want to disappear.

When I first saw the editors’ comments on my piece, I was deeply conflicted.  Their comments were spot on and will be helpful in revision, but they mean that I have to reopen the piece, and work on it again.  Each time I think about revision, I think of each individual incident in the manuscript, and I feel a deep pang of pain, regret or resistance.  It is not a simple revision.

But, I was inspired this weekend by the vulnerability and honesty of a dear friend, in her blog and in her testimony at church.  It made me realize that though this piece is hard, it is important, perhaps the most important piece I’ve written, at least for myself.

I am walking away from the darkness of silence and towards the light of honesty.  And by moving toward that light, I hope that some of it will come into the dark places that still occasionally haunt me.

Moving through Critique

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Another semester, another set of evaluations.

Evaluation time always stresses me out, to be frank.  I’m still working towards tenure and although my evaluations are generally high, I know they’re vitally important to the tenure and promotion process so I worry.

But it goes beyond simple self-interest.  If it were just about not getting tenure, it wouldn’t be so important.  It’s also about self-improvement.  Part of why I dislike the end-of-semester evaluation process is because it’s a one-way conversation.  I would have liked to genuinely sit down with critical students and engage with these critiques earlier in the process, not because I worry about the tenure process, but because I believe in what I do and I believe in the value of understanding when what I do doesn’t land with students the way that I intend.

This semester, I had 2.5 critical evaluations (2 sets of critical comments; 1 set of semi-critical numerical markings with no comments) out of 57 students in my pre-service credential courses.  It’s a 95% approval rate, my best friend pointed out to me.  You can’t make everyone happy, my husband told me.  I know, logically, that these are still high evaluation marks, particularly given the stances I took last semester in the courses I taught. These things are true, but the critiques I received offer points of reflection.

The two major critiques that I received in the Fall had to do with responding respectfully to student concerns (by 2 students) and bias in the course that I held on the day following the election (1 student).  Another critique was that I shouldn’t assume people have time for endless reflection (1 student) and that there’s too much work in my courses (there is a lot of work, but, to be fair, I gave warning of this at the beginning of the semester…and frankly, good teaching is a lot of work).

So, here’s the thing–I don’t want to actually spend this reflective moment justifying myself.  Some of these critiques (reflection, hard work, advocacy) are part of who I am and my professional identity.  I embrace and accept that those things.

But, I am listening to the critique as well.  I have been thinking a lot, in this post election era about the importance of listening and empathy.  No, it wasn’t my intention EVER to disrespect or belittle a student.  It also wasn’t my intention to create an unsafe, biased space on the day after the election (in fact, it was my intention to do the exact opposite).  But, I am acutely aware of the power that I have as a professor, and respect for students is at the CORE of who I am, so I want these students to know that (whether or not it was my intention or even whether or not I agree with them), I hear you; I get that you were left in a space where you felt disrespected, and I am using your critique to think about ways to be more vigilant in expressing my intentions and creating a space for dialogue where more voices can be heard. We can only ever move forward if we can begin to listen to one another instead of staying safely in our own camps.

And, if the student who wrote the evaluation that referred to being a “failure of a teacher” if their students don’t vote is reading this blog, I want to apologize if I said anything like that.  I honestly do not recall saying this, and I think it’s an incredibly problematic statement, given that some students (undocumented students, immigrant non-naturalized students) don’t even have the right to vote in this country AND given the complexity of teaching–no one point makes a teacher a failure.  We are all trying our best.  I do think that it’s important to teach students civic engagement.  I don’t apologize for that.  I do think that students need to participate in their families, communities, and society in productive ways. And, I think it’s important to vote.  Voting is one of those ways.  But, I certainly wouldn’t ever judge a teacher’s success based on the voting rate of their students.  So, for that, if I said that or left you with that, I apologize.

But, here’s the thing.  We are all trying our best.  I am too.  I’ve been at the teaching thing for a long time, yes, and the human thing for even longer.  But, I am imperfect.  My beliefs and intentions don’t always match my actions or how I’m received.   Sometimes they do and we’ll disagree.  Granted.  Sometimes they don’t and my actions will get misinterpreted. Granted.  Sometimes, I need to be more thoughtful about how I speak out of emotion about the things which I am passionate about.  Granted.  But I cannot let the critique stop me from action, from advocacy, and from engaging with that which I fear.

And that is why, despite the fact that I also don’t have so much time for reflection, I do it: because I have to keep acting every day; because the course of a semester is long and I have just begun a new semester where I am certain to make mistakes; because this work is my calling.  I have a deep love for my students and their future students. Personally, I want to keep improving. And as a member of this society, I constantly see openings for action that call me to do better. But I refuse to be driven by the fear of critique.

The work is hard.  And critique is hard…particularly when you are trying to step out and be heard. But, all of this is necessary if we are to be the change that we wish to see–whatever one’s version of that change may be.

The Language of Feedback

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So, today, a colleague of mine and I received a decision on a revised manuscript that we submitted for review.  While the initial reviews were professional and constructive, the reviewers were less than pleased with our revision with one reviewer calling our revised work “quite alarming,” “self-congratulatory,” and saying that the manuscript quite possibly “detracted from the complex, messy and hard work we engage in everyday of working to sustain identities and compose lives as teacher educators” critiquing our lack of critical engagement and inquiry.

Okay, so, clearly, this was not the best work my colleague and I have ever submitted and the way in which our data was addressed could have been more critical and careful.  In fact, the content of the critique allowed us to think about our work differently and we admittedly should have taken more time to resubmit our piece.  However, reading the feedback and having received feedback that was similar in tone previously to an article (though substantively different), made me realize the importance of tone in feedback…

Web of learning during final class session

Web of learning during final class session

In our final class session last week, several students mentioned the importance of the feedback I provided for them over the semester as well as the importance of the safety of community in the classroom as they were learning about and establishing their professional identities.  Students emphasized how essential the timely, thoughtful responses to their work were in their development and one student who I’ll call “D” said something that really stuck with me, “You know, when I submitted something and Professor Hsieh gave me feedback, I never had to be afraid that she was going to yell at me.  She would just tell me what I needed to improve on and I would say, ‘Okay, I can do that’,’ and then I would know how it could be better.” I turned to him, with a bit of amusement mixed with concern and said, “D, did you really think I’d yell at you?” He said that he didn’t really think that but that sometimes other instructors had made him feel like he really didn’t know what he was doing without telling him what he needed to do differently.

In the case of our submission, there was clear feedback on what needed to be changed in the article, but the tone of the critique was condescending and problematic, exactly the paternalistic & oppressive tone that we had been accused of perpetuating in the paper itself.  While I am confident enough in my own professional identity to come back from this critique and while I have done extensive inquiry into and reflection on my own work as a teacher educator to know that this feedback certainly doesn’t represent who I am as a teacher educator (I’ve never been called self-congratulatory in my life before today), the tone of this review makes me wonder how we treat our colleagues, fellow scholars, and our students in giving feedback.

Words hurt.  And people’s lives, their work, their thoughts matter.  Even if a piece isn’t accepted for a journal, even if a student shouldn’t be a teacher (and there are some that truly and painfully shouldn’t), there is no value in devaluing the work, the life, the passion of others.  This doesn’t mean that we accept every submission or that we lower our standards for rigor in our courses, but it does mean that we recognize that what we say, particularly when we evaluate one another, has power, and we treat that power with the utmost respect and care–like we should treat the humans to whom we are responding.