by Mike Pardee, Faculty, gcLi, English Faculty and Advisor, The Crefeld School in Philadelphia, PA
Needless to say, giving and receiving candid feedback is one of the gcLi Leadership Lab’s pedagogical and philosophical keystones. Exchanging authentic, transparent feedback is an essential element of fruitful relationships and high-functioning groups. It is also an instrumental aspect of effective communication and leadership. Ideally, feedback is an inherently dialogical process. The dialogical nature of feedback doesn’t always get lots of attention; but it remains essential to both the Leadership Lab’s m.o. (modus operandi) and the way the gcLi conducts its quality control research. The gcLi has solicited extensive feedback from Leadership Lab participants ever since its first session in 2005. This feedback crucially informs the evolution of the Lab over time and has resulted in countless improvements to the learning experiences that the gcLi offers.
Succeeding former gcLi Executive Director and lead researcher Ted Fish, I have been conducting the gcLi’s quality control research since 2019. That has entailed summarizing and synthesizing participants’ final feedback at the end of the past five Leadership Labs (excepting the Covid year of 2020, when gcLi offered a virtual program only). As gcLi alumni may well remember, one of the last weekly rituals of the Lab each year is our solicitation of participants’ feedback through a detailed online survey (via a comprehensive Google Form). Once they submit their responses to both Likert Scale and open-ended prompts about every session and several other key aspects of their learning experiences, our researcher generates a report highlighting their feedback’s key themes.
The faculty, gcLi scholars, and the Carney family are the only ones who see this final research report (which has ranged in recent years anywhere from 40-95 pages in length, featuring input from anywhere from 35-58 respondents in any given year). And participants may well forget they have completed and submitted it once they return home from Colorado and resume their summer activities. For the faculty and Carneys and the institute researcher, however, each year’s participants have simply contributed to an ongoing annual dialogue that will reverberate for future years, as well. In order to elucidate the nature of this dialogical process and what happens behind the scenes after the research report is completed, I offer the following reflections.
For those–like me–who love language and the linguistic origins of certain words and concepts, etymological roots can often be especially instructive. They also pertain in illuminating ways to the three interconnected terms at play in this blog post: feedback, dialogue, and our ongoing gcLi research. “Feedback” is actually a relatively new term in the English language. The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests that it’s only about a century old. Apparently, it initially emerged in the context of electronics, and only more recently became current in the ways we use it more popularly (i.e. “information about the results of a process”) today.
The deeper Indo-European origins of the “feed” root have connotations of “nourishing, sustaining or fostering.” These roots also resonate with the seminal concept of feedback as a gift. As a matter of fact, feedback is often most effective whenever it’s given in a truly dialogical exchange, or both freely given and then “given back, given again” or given “back and forth.” In this sense, the words “feedback” and “dialogue” are indeed closely related. The legendary physicist David Bohm fruitfully explored the implications of this latter term in a concise collection of his essays and lectures called On Dialogue. He wanted to explore and clarify in this volume the optimal ways we can communicate, and some of the obstacles that sometimes interfere with clear communication between people.
For instance, Bohm explicates the etymology and origin of the word “communicate” as follows: “‘Communication’…is based on the Latin commun and the suffix “ie” which is similar to “fie,” in that it means “to make or to do.” So one meaning of “to communicate” is “to make something common,” i.e. to convey information or knowledge from one person to another in as accurate a way as possible.” As his book’s title On Dialogue suggests, he illuminates how genuine “dialogue” is often the purest, most efficient, constructive, and accurate form of human communication in this revealing passage:
‘Dialogue’ comes from the Greek word dialogos. Logos means ‘the word,’ or in our case we would think of the ‘meaning of the word.’ And dia means ‘through’–it doesn’t mean ‘two.’ A dialogue can be among any number of people, not just two. Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of dialogue is present.
The picture or image that this derivation suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which may emerge some new understanding. It’s something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It’s something creative. And this shared meaning is the ‘glue’ or ‘cement’ that holds people and societies together.
Contrast this with the word ‘discussion,’ which has the same root as ‘percussion’ and ‘concussion.’ It really means to break things up. It emphasizes the idea of analysis, where there may be many points of view, and where everybody is presenting a different one–analyzing and breaking up. That obviously has its value, but it is limited, and it will not get us very far beyond our various points of view. Discussion is almost like a Ping-Pong game, where people are batting their ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or to get points for yourself…
In a dialogue, however, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins. There is a different sort of spirit to it. In a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It’s a situation called win-win, in which we are not playing a game against each other but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.
Without a doubt, all gcLi’ers have “won” as a result of some twenty-years’-worth of dialogical feedback from Leadership Lab participants. Leadership Lab alumni may be only vaguely aware of the impact their feedback has had, since they aren’t directly privy to the final research report that emerges from it. What they should know and fully appreciate, however, is how invaluable their contributions are and have been to “the stream of meaning” that animates and informs the gcLi as a learning organization.
Every morning during the course of the Lab, Executive Director Jeremy Lacasse or other faculty share written feedback we have recently received from participants, and strive to model responding constructively to that ongoing daily feedback. Unfortunately, there isn’t an exactly analogous response from faculty or the lead researcher to the entire body of feedback we glean from the more comprehensive survey at the end of the Lab. But alumni should know that their parting feedback on those Google Forms vitally sustains the kind of dialogical communication that serves as the lifeblood of the gcLi’s “stream of meaning” as a learning organization. Our response to that feedback may not be immediate or verbal; but it invariably redounds to the benefit of future gcLi’ers and the Institute as a whole.
For that gift, the gcLi–and all of its varied constituents–remains eternally grateful. The evidence of our gratitude shows up in the changes–increasingly often subtle revisions–that faculty make when planning and then delivering the next Leadership Lab’s curricular programming. In that regard, the annual end-of-week survey and ensuing research report fosters a sort of asynchronous dialogue between gcLi’ers of different years, as well as each particular year’s participants and faculty.
This feedback process may not exactly be one of “back and forth” or “give and take” in real time or in person. But it is a fundamentally generous and generative one. And that is perhaps the epitome of the essence of the idea of feedback as a gift.
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Mike Pardee teaches 9th and 10th grade English and serves as an Advisor at The Crefeld School in Philadelphia. He formerly taught Transdisciplinary Humanities as the Program Director at Revolution School in Philadelphia’s Center City. Prior to that, he was the founding Associate Director and Dean of Faculty at Lab Atlanta, an innovative, experiential semester school engaging enterprising 10th graders from throughout the city in a place-based educational program. Mr. Pardee served previously as the Associate Director of Community Engagement of the Boniuk Institute for Religious Tolerance at Rice University, as Director of Character Education at the Kinkaid School in Houston, Texas, and as Executive Director of the Leadership Initiative at Suffield Academy in Connecticut. He also has several years’ experience teaching and coaching at various independent schools, including Albuquerque Academy in New Mexico and Concord Academy in Massachusetts. He did his undergraduate work at Princeton University, earned his M.A. in American Studies from Boston University, and a second M.A. in private school leadership from Columbia Teachers College in New York City. His years of research and first-hand experience inspire his exploration of both the theoretical and practical applications of leadership training and character development at the gcLi Leadership Lab.