If life is what happens to our plans, then dance is what happens to our steps.
ideas sometimes when you wait they come to you.

Preparation for starting with BAPP

Monday, 27 February 2017

Thoughts on Feedback.


I have just been talking to people about their feedback to our feedback for Module Two !!! It sounds back and forth. But I see feedback as a two-way street. It is not about us telling you what to do in the disguise of feedback. For me feedback is about giving someone more ideas to think about or another way to look at the same thing. Therefore feedback on my feedback is just a response saying what it made you think of, it’s a discussion. It is not a about defending something but about walking together through an idea. Often in the past you may have been given ‘corrections’ as ‘feedback’ but I think they are different things. Corrections are one-way, feedback is two-way.

Here is something I recently wrote with a colleague about feedback in the dance classes.

What do you think? Feedback in the comments below!!

“At the beginning of our inquiry we were interested in exploring how students received ‘feedback’. We thought this would involve discovering more about the forms and ways feedback can be communicated to students, particularly how a climate of negative feedback can be avoided in the classroom.
However, as we carried out the research we realized that merely looking at how feedback is communicated constructs feedback as one directional.
We questioned whether we had been placing enough importance on the notion that feedback can be transactional.  Following John Dewey, we take the term transactional to indicate dynamic, co-created relationships and environments (Dewey 2008).

We realized that how feedback is communicated is significant, of course, but the means by which it is recognized as feedback by students, and how it is responded to is of equal bearing. This led us to consider the importance of students’ (and teachers’) critical thinking in our classrooms, as we felt student responses to feedback is as important as the action of giving it. By critical thinking we are suggesting skills of evaluation that allow for synthesis of ideas and support the ability to have shifts in perception. Particularly, for our students to develop the analytical skills to let go of an essentialist approach to their perception of themselves as dancers, and instead critically challenge their habitual movements and notions of what dance can be. Thus we see critical thinking as supporting the co-construction and permeability of a transactional approach to feedback.”

(You can read the Whole thing in the MDX on-line library, here is the citation  Akinleye, Adesola & Rose Payne (2016) “Transactional Space: Feedback, critical thinking, and learning dance technique”, Journal of Dance Education, Vol.16 Iss: 4, pp.144-148, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15290824.2016.1165821
DOI: 10.1080/15290824.2016.1165821?


1 comment:

  1. I found this post really interesting after both receiving my module 2 feedback, and after recently interviewing my dance captain in the work place. The idea of feedback being a 2 way street, a discussion so to speak and an opportunity to explore different opinions/perspectives is really helpful. I can see how this applies in my current professional practice when receiving notes from the dance captain on a performance. It may be that they highlight a particular move or piece of choreography and I then explore different ways of execution or dynamic - it isn't necessarily a right or wrong, but giving more dimension or thought to certain areas perhaps. I now see how the same applies to feedback or notes during my studies/post submission.

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