How can we deliver crucial insights to those who require them the most ?
This guiding statement has steered the Feedback Loops work at Digital Promise for the past two years, exploring avenues for diverse communities to collaborate and enhance education. Looking ahead, this becomes even more crucial with the accelerated pace of edtech product life cycles, evident in the recent introduction and widespread adoption of generative AI tools. Our engagement in research and design work with communities of researchers, practitioners, and edtech product developers has led us to formulate several principles. These principles are aimed at aiding in the creation of learning technology that aligns with the diverse needs of students and educators, adheres to modern learning principles, and is designed for broad adoption and scalability.
Whether it’s a commonplace activity like curriculum adoption in a district or a unique initiative such as a research hub, considering how parties can contribute to and benefit from their involvement in education initiatives will result in more insightful and high-quality exchanges among participants. The feedback loop concept adopts a systems-thinking approach to collaboration between communities, emphasizing mutual benefit through capacity building. Within a feedback loop, participants undergo a transformation in their knowledge, actions, or goals while contributing their expertise to an initiative. The outlined principles can be applied to enhance existing collaborations between educators and edtech products, generate ideas for structuring new projects and initiatives, and contemplate how impactful technology is developed, adopted, and implemented.
Guiding Principles for Building Feedback Loops
1. Create with the aim of mutual advantage.
In endeavors aiming to revolutionize education and construct influential educational technology, formulating a strategy for collaboration among partners is as crucial as the ultimate outcome. Thoughtful attention to bidirectionality, ensuring reciprocal benefits through alterations in knowledge, actions, or objectives, is a fundamental element in generating successful projects that yield significant outputs and bring about meaningful transformations for the participants
2. Identify a mediator
During our initial initiatives with research, product, and practice communities, it became evident that having a dedicated and reliable third-party facilitator would enhance any project operating within their spheres of expertise. The facilitator assumes diverse roles, serving as a project manager, content and context expert, translator/communicator, and more, tailoring their functions to the specific needs of the participants. Opt for a facilitator with the ability to collaborate across communities and empower them to shape the course of the work.
3. Address Continuity, Consensus, and Customization
During a design convening that brought together researchers, edtech product developers, and practitioners to prototype cross-community feedback loops, it was evident that educators face challenges related to the absence of consistency in the products they utilize, a lack of agreement across different levels of school systems, and a need for greater flexibility to address the unique needs of their students. In any research and design initiative within a school setting, the crucial elements include fostering consensus among participants, directing the project outputs towards the diverse needs of student populations, and ensuring that the resulting outcomes can function independently of any research or efficacy study.
4. Embrace the Tension
In cross-community collaborations, tension arises naturally due to misalignment in rules, objectives, and contexts among participants. However, viewing this tension as an opportunity for innovation is crucial, and it should be met with a curious approach. Our pilot participants recognized numerous tensions between research, product, and practice, such as differing time cycles, scalability challenges, and the need to support a large number of students, as well as concerns about long-term sustainability. T
hese tensions became the driving force to creatively “design around” the constraints.
Applying the Concept of Feedback Loops
“In imagining or creating something new, it’s hard to disentangle what you’ve experienced with what is possible.” — note from the Feedback Loops Design Convening
Explore Further:
- Collaborative Teaching: Partner, Grading Assistant, or Substitute Teacher?
- Student Empowerment: AI’s Role in Designing Community Solutions
- AI’s Impact on Secondary Writing: Optimizing Instruction and Learning
- Grading Support: Can AI Assist Teachers Effectively?
- Expertise Enhancement: Teachers’ Reflections on AI-Embedded Writing Rubric
- Personalized Language Arts Education: Insights from a Teacher
- AI in Higher Ed: Leveraging Existing Knowledge for Effective Teaching
- Accelerating Student Writing with an AI-Powered Tool
- Empowering Educators with Artificial Intelligence for Profound Learning
- Anthropomorphism of AI in Learning Environments: Risks of Humanization
How can these guiding principles be practically implemented? With the increasing integration of generative AI into educational technology, there is a growing need to enhance research, validation, and use cases for these tools. A constructive approach, guided by the feedback loop concept, involves establishing a Research-Practice-Industry Partnership (RPIP). Through an RPIP, partners with diverse expertise can collaborate to generate new insights into the practical use of AI tools by educators, proposing enhancements to product features while simultaneously preparing practitioners to deploy these tools effectively in classrooms.
Aida Hadzovic, an English Language Arts teacher at PS 226 in Brooklyn, New York, and a participant in the feedback loops project, attests to the benefits of teaching alongside AI. She emphasizes the importance of building robust feedback loops, stating, “Teaching alongside AI facilitates teaching writing, providing feedback, and implementing feedback within a reasonable timeframe.” Aida’s experience with AI in the classroom, as part of the Project Topeka team, underscores the necessity of cultivating stronger feedback loops.
“We were able to discuss AI and equity, spending time writing and calibrating rubrics, learning how to give feedback, and differentiating between the feedback of a human versus AI, which remains part of my skill set even after the end of the project,” says Hadzovic. She suggests that careful attention to structuring interactions between educators and products is crucial for successful edtech development and implementation. “There’s a delicate balancing act between learning and adapting a new program in our daily instruction; we need to continuously communicate, provide feedback and data, and collaborate, not solely at the end of the product’s usage.”
The principles outlined above for creating collaborative structures extend beyond edtech product development or research. Education transformation stakeholders are encouraged to adopt a feedback loop lens when planning their work. For those seeking guidance on building feedback loops, a free-to-use Miro template, along with a model library and other resources, has been developed. Edtech product developers currently involved in feedback loop work with school districts are invited to consider applying for the Practitioner-Informed Design Product Certification.
