Hello everyone! My name is José-Manuel Villanueva and I’m a City College Graduate Art Education student and a digital product designer.
Feedback is a topic that I am intrigued and passionate about. Learning how to provide and receive feedback has been pivotal for my success as a product designer for wearables. Over my last four years at product design studio ustwo, I observed how fellow teammates continually exposed to feedback—e.g. once every 2 weeks in sessions called ‘retros’—developed a sense of responsibility to grow themselves and other individuals within their team. Today, tech and design giants like Google and Apple rely on creative leadership think tanks that coach their employees to thrive in a culture of feedback with the ultimate goal of pushing innovation forward. But feeling that growth in my career hasn’t been a one-to-one experience while being an art student—and believe me, I’ve been a student pretty much all my life!
As a visual arts student, too often I felt unsatisfied during design critiques due to the lack of specific, assertive feedback both from fellow classmates and from teachers. Recently, on a graduate level course, to the prompt of voicing out ‘things that could be improved on a classmate’s artwork’, I observed how my fellow classmates struggled and felt visibly uncomfortable over and over again when asked to provide constructive feedback on a fellow classmates’ artwork. Sounding ‘nice’ and overtly positive seemed more important than being assertive and critical: “I don’t have anything negative to say”, I heard repeatedly and thus missing the point of what experts consider as delivering effective feedback. Hence, I’m starting to believe that, as pre-service art teachers, we still don’t understand the critical purpose and valuable gift that providing effective peer-to-peer feedback is. Neither do we know how to make the most of the feedback received. Consequently, how can we coach our students into feedback practices if we seem to misunderstanding those practices while being trained as art teachers? What does implementing a peer-to-peer feedback framework look like in the art room? In which ways does that framework impacting the artwork of the students exposed to it?
Over the course of the next four weeks I will implement a peer-to-peer feedback framework in a group of 6th graders from a NYC public school. This peer-to-peer feedback framework will be inspired by years of theories and academic research from what scholars like Hattie and Timperley (2007) coined as effective feedback.
By enacting this peer-to-peer feedback framework in a real classroom setting, I hope that art teachers and the overall education community understand that practicing effective peer-to-peer feedback in schools is critical to propel our students’ creativity and innovation thinking forward.
