One of the key features of Olin is its experimental status. Innovation in engineering education is a cornerstone of Olin. That means constantly identifying what could be better and attempting to improve it. Part of the way that we do that is through feedback.
For all that the lifeblood of Olin is feedback, as students we really only get reasonable training in giving feedback to teammates. Design Nature and the first semester seminar (OIE) both cover teaming strategies, including giving feedback, and peer and self evaluations are included throughout the design stream, including SCOPE, as well as in some other classes. Through these classes we see different ways of giving team feedback and processing it, so by the time we leave Olin we all have a pretty good idea of how to give good feedback to the people we work with and how to keep any eye on team health.
We're also given some instruction in giving feedback on processes that teams follow. I remember covering this in my entrepreneurship foundation and SCOPE, but I think it was also discussed elsewhere. We're encouraged to think back on the process we've taken over the past sprint or segment of working time and identify positive things about our process and changes we should make to that process (this is called plus/delta).
We get practice in other types of feedback, but it's not necessarily useful practice. We fill out course evaluations at the end of every semester, and many professors ask for course feedback throughout the semester in other forms, but we never really get feedback on that feedback. That means that students don't necessarily get better at giving course feedback unless they talk about how to improve courses with professors. Being a NINJA really helped me get better at giving course feedback because I was working with both students and professors for a particular class, and I was able to carry over my thoughts on those interactions to how I thought about feedback for other classes. Plus/delta also carries over to some extent, and I think I remember that the Curriculum Innovation Committee sent out an email near the end of one semester encouraging people to frame their course feedback in a plus/delta way.
Course feedback is always a problem. Students are busy at the end of the semester and then don't want to think about classes after they're done, so it can be like pulling teeth to get good response rates. There have also been some problems with how constructive the feedback tends to be, which is part of why the CIC sent an email suggesting a format. I think having more conversations around course feedback would be helpful, and I like when feedback is incorporated throughout a course, not just at the end. That seems to create a culture of giving more valuable and implementable feedback. Another technique I appreciate (and something I've used when asking for feedback) is to highlight specific areas in which feedback would be most helpful. That can limit how broadly people think, so maybe you lose potentially valuable comments, but overall I think it gives people somewhere to start and results in more focused and applicable thoughts.
One of the things I most admire about the new analysis stream course, Quantitative Engineering Analysis (QEA), is the teaching team's dedication to getting and acting upon feedback. They stated from the beginning that they would teach the course for three years as an experiment. It's a massive effort and very experimental, so there are plenty of ways that it could go wrong in this first iteration in minor or dramatic ways. Teaching it once and saying, "Oh, that didn't go the way we wanted it to," would be giving up too quickly. Experimental classes ought to be run multiple times as experiments; we need a chance to iterate on the course based on feedback, and the first few iterations might need to differ from each other significantly.
We also receive feedback in most activities that we do, but the conversation around how to give feedback in classes especially is constant. We get written (and usually verbal) comments on all the design reviews and presentations that we give, and in general feedback in classes is more comment-based than number-based. That makes grading interesting, to say the least. I'll talk more about that in another post, though; the problem of grades deserves its own space.
And finally, there's always some discussion here around reflection, which I do think is a form of feedback. It can primarily be self feedback, but for me it has also helped me think about team, process, and course feedback. Some students choose not to look at their grades, and instead they write reflections each semester. Most of the conversation around reflections have concluded that reflection is usually not something we should mandate that students do, but it is something we want to encourage.
Reflection is something that has been important to me from my first semester at Olin, but over the past year and a half I've started appreciated giving and receiving feedback a lot more. Before junior year, I had put effort into course evaluations, but I started thinking about them more carefully in Budapest and coming back to Olin. Peer feedback within my SCOPE team helped us make needed changes to how we were operating as a team and how I did some of my work. And this semester I was doing weekly grading for AoPS and Discrete, where the grading is mostly about the comments and not the numbers, and giving feedback on the faculty candidates who visited.
All of that also made me crave more feedback on my work. In conversations with members of the Faculty Search Committee, I asked for feedback on the feedback I was giving; I wanted to make sure that it was useful. One of the most frustrating things in the first project of Sustainable Design was that it took a long time for us to get feedback after design reviews. On AoPS, I can see the changes that the teacher makes to my comments before releasing it to students, and that's helped me improve over the course of the semester. It's a little awkward that at a time when I've finally realized how much I appreciate feedback and want more of it, I'm leaving a feedback-heavy place for a more hands-off environment.
Olin definitely works best as a feedback-heavy place. The more we encourage productive ways to give and receive feedback, the more we'll be able to accomplish our institutional goals, and the better of a place Olin will be. I've focused mostly on academic feedback here, but really, this applies outside of academics, too. Olin runs on feedback, which means feedback is something we should be trying to get better at.
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