At Pacific Crest and in Process Education, we generally divide feedback into ASSESSEMENT-based and EVALUATION-based. The first is about improving performance; the latter about judging performance. As paradigms go, it is helpful. Extremely so, according to many faculty members and students.
But there’s another paradigm that’s been floating around for a while in management circles and is now fairly easy to find within education as well. It’s about differentiating FEEDBACK from FEEDFORWARD. Originally, feedforward was intended as a form of Appreciative Inquiry.
In Feedforward first – feedback later, their keynote presentation at the 26th International Congress of Applied Psychology (Athens, Greece; July 2006), Kluger and Nir recommend feedforward as a 3-phase appreciative interview to be conducted prior to or in lieu of feedback intervention. The phases are:
- eliciting a story during which the person being interviewed was at their best, from their perspective
- teasing out the conditions that made it possible for them to perform so well
- identifying the emotions during the climax of the story
They recommend continuing with a feedforward question: “To what degree do your plans for the immediate future take you closer to, or further away from, the conditions that allowed you to be at your best?“
In their words, “This question sparks a behavioral change towards greater alignment between one’s deep interest and one’s plans.“
They continue:
“Unlike feedback, which has multiple detrimental consequences, feedforward creates positive emotions, fosters bonding, builds psychological safety, and promotes the elicitation and sharing of vital new information regarding keys for personal and organizational flourishing.”
And this is the point at which we are compelled to raise a serious objection: Assessment-based feedback is specifically calibrated to avoid detrimental consequences!
But upon deeper reflection, feedforward and its foundation of Appreciative Inquiry make explicit that which even SII Assessment leaves implicit or treats parenthetically: Future Focus: The NEXT Performance.
SII Assessment is mostly commonly defined as feedback given after a performance that focuses on the Strengths of the performance (and how to recreate them), Areas of Improvement (and how to make them), and Insights gained through the process of performing the assessment.
Buried within this is the assumption that, with the exception of Insights, all feedback is geared towards learning from the assessed performance in order to perform better the next time.
As such, there’s little reason to assess a one-off performance (e.g., throwing your own 50th birthday party). You’re never going to have another one, after all. Of course, the performance could be generalized to throwing a party and then Strengths and Areas for Improvement given for the performance of throwing the one, specific, and non-repeating birthday party could be useful for any future party-throwing performance.
Is this something we make clear to those whose performance we’re assessing?
Heraclitus contended that we can never step into the same river twice and there’s something to that. Every paper a student writes and every test they take ARE unique…and far more so to the student than to the instructor. If we assess a specific paper, do we clarify to the student that the feedback we give is intended to help them for the next paper they write? For their future performance? If they’re not truly understanding that, then however future-and-improvement-focused our feedback might be, it is going to feel to the student as if we’ve judged something they have no hope of improving…at least without a time machine.
Strengths of a performance can sound like a complement about the past performance: X was great! The part that is too often merely parenthetical is how to recreate that same strength in the next performance. Do we make that link clear or do we allow the Strength part of an assessment to serve as the positive aspect to balance out the Areas for Improvement we’re going to share? If so, then little wonder the SII feedback we give can come across as backward looking.
Areas for Improvement are more problematic. For individuals steeped in a highly evaluative culture (i.e., all of us), we almost automatically translate “improvements you can make” as “what you should have done”. Because of that, it is of the utmost importance that the future performance is clearly presented as the context for the Areas for Improvement. If it is not, then we risk having our feedback taken as criticism, since there is no possible way to change the performance being assessed. That we accompany Areas for Improvement with concrete suggestions for making those improvements will simply feel like salt in the wound of critique if we don’t ensure that the next performance is what we and the assessee are focused on.
SII Assessment potentially contains much of what feedforward explicitly offers. And when conducted with great care and awareness of an assessee’s mindset, assessment-based feedback can be forward-focused, if not technically feedforward. That’s important if we want the assessment-based feedback we give to be as useful as possible.
