Neglected Feedback is the Real Failure
“You have failed!” “You are a failure!” These are commonly used phrases in our societal routines but how do you feel when you hear such phrases?
Philip Kambe, the CEO of Intelligence Performance Company, refers to failure as feedback in many of his coaching sessions. Today I want to share with you my experience of feedback in a school context.
Feedback is often trashed and ignored because our communities are neither structured nor prepared to receive challenging feedback positively and willing to act upon it. The most affected institutions in regard to acting upon challenging feedback are schools. Teachers in schools, quite often, trample on their learners’ feedback and instead brand it as ‘failure’. Failure is neglected feedback.
When a child doesn’t get a correct answer to a Math problem, he is a ‘failure’; when she constructs a faulty English sentence, she's a ‘failure’; when he comes late to school, dodges class or at worst drops out of school, he is a ‘failure’! Teachers in schools don’t want to work with ‘failures’. They dislike them, they are careless about them. They call them Time-wasters.
Teachers forget that children express their emotional, social, health and academic challenges through their classwork and assignments. This is what their feedback looks like:
“I was unable to get the correct answer because your methods and formulae were not clear.” “I was unable to write a correct sentence because the content was not relating to experiences familiar to me and I didn't see how I could apply it in daily life.” “I didn’t get it right because the activities selected were boring, incoherent and monotonous.” “I was unable to get it because you didn’t give me care or love. You were just rude!” “I couldn’t get it right because I was hungry.”
If feedback is not reflectively utilized by the teacher, it leads to underperformance and it inhibits the learner’s maximum potential. These are the learners who repeat the grades or drop out of school. Teachers call them ‘failures’. If this is what education looks like in your school, where is the justice?
During my teaching leadership, I met a pupil who, for the sake of this story, I will refer to as Dogolo. His teachers called him an academic failure. However, he had unquestionable skills and competences in extracurricular activities. He wowed his ‘architects’. Because I was teaching the class that he was repeating, I was extremely curious about him. So, during our break time, over mugs of porridge, I asked three of his teachers about his academic history. Their feedback overwhelmed me!
“That boy is an academic dwarf!” was the first teacher's emphatic response. The second teacher added, “Teacher Decimon, that one is a failure! He has repeated the 5th grade twice!”
Out of concern, I asked these teachers what special intervention they had for him. The third teacher confidently responded that he wasn’t about to waste his time with Dogolo. “I’d rather resign this job!” he added.
I determined to learn more and understand Dogolo’s academic and social life from his own perspective. So at 4:30 PM, the following day, I escorted him back home. Two kilometers away from the school, we sat on a dry stamp along the path for a quick chat.
“Master, if you teach like that, the children will pass!” he started.
“How about you?” I asked.
“Mine is a long way!”
“Why?”
“Because all the teachers in my school say I can’t pass,” he responded in a hopeless tone.
When I asked why he thinks the teachers say so, he sadly told me that it was because he failed all his classwork and exams. When I asked why he is not performing well, he said to me, “I don’t come to school daily. Sometimes, teachers pay me to work in their gardens while the pupils are studying, sometimes I am sick.”
I, then, asked if he wants to pass Grade Five. He confessed that he really wanted to because he wants to grow up to become a mechanic. I encouraged him to come to school every day and affirmed him. “You will pass,” I said with confidence.
Think about this child and the many poor children elsewhere going through similar situations and how teachers have skillfully murdered their dreams by refusing to listen genuinely. The good news is that we can prepare such teachers to change their mindset and be reflective of the learners’ feedback in order to take concrete actions for their academic improvement.
In Eric Jensen’s book, Teaching With Poverty in Mind, he suggests that a teacher should be a hope-builder in the classroom. He, further, suggests that it is important to develop and sustain engaging instruction.
In Steven B. Sheldon and Sol Bee Jung’s Johns Hopkins University 2015 report entitled The Family Engagement Partnership, they recommend that effective teachers should conduct well-organized objective-driven lessons that provide students with multiple ways to move towards mastery, respond to student understanding, and develop students’ higher-level understanding. They continue to say that building trusting relationships between teachers and families are key drivers to improved Learner outcomes. These relationships should be based on home visits and constant communication between teachers and parents.
Teaching should not be a business of a good teacher; it should be for the outstanding teachers ready to go beyond the institutional or college basic preparation. It should be for those teachers willing to leap above the description of a good teacher to that of An Exceptional Teacher. The good teachers have given us average employees, scientists, parents and have successfully kept our country in mediocrity. Exceptional teachers are the ones creating change. Don’t you want to change?
The writer of this article, Decimon Wandera, was placed at Nabutaka Primary School in Luwero district as a 2018/2019 Fellow. He and his colleague mobilized parents and other stakeholders to value education and take their children to school. His efforts led to an increment in student enrollment from 86 students in 2018 to at least 250 students to date. In addition to being one of our brilliant Pioneer Alumni, he is currently a Leadership Development Officer with Teach For Uganda placed in Mayuge district, in Eastern Uganda.
