How do we get information to the people who need it most?
This declaration has guided the feedback circuits We have been working on Digital Promise for the past two years as we explore ways different communities can collaborate to improve education. Looking ahead, this will become even more important as the speed of edtech product lifecycles increases, as evidenced by the recent launch and adoption of generative ai tools across the landscape. Engaging in research and design work with communities of educational technology researchers, practitioners, and product developers has led us to define several principles that we believe will help create learning technology that is in tune with the needs of diverse students and educators, based on modern learning principles and designed for broad adoption and scale.
Whether as common as the adoption of a curriculum in a district or as unique as a research center, considering how parties could contribute and benefit from their interactions in educational initiatives will lead to more and wider knowledge sharing. quality among participants. The feedback loop concept is a systemically thinking way of approaching collaboration between communities, focused on mutual benefit through capacity development. In a feedback loop, participants experience a transformation of their knowledge, actions, or goals as they contribute their expertise to an initiative. The following principles can be used to deepen existing collaborations between educators and educational technology products, generate ideas to structure new projects and initiatives, and reflect on how impactful technology is developed, adopted, and implemented.
Guiding Principles for Creating Feedback Loops
1. Design for mutual benefit
In projects seeking to transform education and create impactful educational technology, creating a plan for how partners work together is as important as the end result. Careful consideration of bidirectionality (ensuring mutual benefit through changes in knowledge, actions or goals) is a key component to producing successful projects that generate impactful results and meaningful changes in participants.
2. Find a facilitator
In our pilot work with research, product and practice communities, each identified that a dedicated and trusted external facilitator would be a welcome addition to any project working in their areas of expertise. A facilitator plays many roles, including project manager, content and context expert, translator/communicator, and more, depending on the needs of the participants. Use a facilitator who can work across communities and empower them to influence the direction of the work.
3. Attend to Continuity, Consensus and Personalization
At a design meeting where researchers, edtech product developers, and practitioners came together to prototype cross-community feedback loops, we clearly heard that educators face a lack of continuity in the products they use, a lack of consensus across levels of the school systems in which they work. insufficient work and flexibility to build and create for the particular needs of their students. For any research and design project in a school context, building consensus among participants is paramount, as is ensuring that the results of the work are directed to the needs of diverse student populations and that the resulting results can live independently of any research or effectiveness study.
4. Lean into the tension
Tension in collaborations between communities is natural and is the result of a misalignment between rules, objectives and contexts of the participants. However, this tension provides an opportunity for innovation and must be approached with curiosity. Our pilot participants identified many tensions between research, product, and practice, including different time cycles, the ability to scale and support many students, long-term sustainability, and more, all of which served as impetus to “design around” limitations.
Apply the feedback loop concept
“When imagining or creating something new, it's difficult to disentangle what you've experienced with what's possible.” — feedback loop design call note
How could these guiding principles be put into practice? As generative ai becomes increasingly integrated into educational technology, we see a need to develop better research, research, and use cases for these tools. One way to structure it using the idea of the feedback loop as a guide is Research-practice-industry association (RPPI). In an RPIP, we can connect partners with different expertise to generate new insights into professionals' use of ai tools and suggest improvements to product features while preparing professionals to use these tools more effectively in their classrooms. .
“Teaching alongside ai makes it easier to teach writing, provide feedback, and implement it within a reasonable timeframe,” says Aida Hadzovic, an ELA teacher at PS 226 in Brooklyn, New York, and a participant in the Loops project. feedback. Aida's experience with ai in the classroom as a member of the Topeka Project The team talks about the need to create stronger feedback loops.
“We were able to discuss ai and equity and spent time writing and calibrating rubrics, learning how to give feedback, and differentiating between human and ai feedback, which is still part of my skill set even after finish the project.” Hadzovic suggests that paying close attention to structuring interactions between educators and products is a path to more successful development and implementation of educational technology. “There is a delicate balancing act between learning and adapting a new program into our daily instruction; “We need to continually communicate, provide feedback and data, and collaborate, not just at the end of product use.”
Using the principles described above to create collaborative structures is not limited to educational technology product development or research; In fact, we encourage all stakeholders in education transformation to use a feedback loop perspective when considering how to carry out their work. If you're looking for guidance on how to create feedback loops, we've developed a Miró's template which is free to use in your planning activities, along with a library of models and other resources. If you are an educational technology product developer currently participating in a feedback loop with school districts, we encourage you to consider applying for our Certification of design products informed by professionals.
