This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 87 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast.

In this episode, we're going to talk about how shifting from feedback to feed forward

can make a huge difference in helping the students and other people in our lives grow.

As teachers, we pretty much give feedback all day long. We tell students how they can improve on assignments.

We praise them for things they're doing well. We correct their incorrect responses.

And we redirect them when they behave in ways that aren't helpful to learning.

And that's just the students. We also give feedback to our colleagues,

although in most cases these exchanges don't happen as often or as freely as they probably should.

We receive plenty of feedback as well from our students, their parents, our administrators, and our peers.

And we encourage our students to give feedback to each other with pretty uneven results.

Really, the experience of school could be described as one long feedback session,

where every day people show up with the goal of improving while other people tell them how to do it.

And it doesn't always go well. As we give and receive feedback, people get defensive. Feelings get hurt.

Too often the improvements we're going for don't happen because the feedback isn't given in a way that the receiver can embrace.

It turns out there is a different way to give feedback that works a lot better,

a way of flipping its focus from the past to the future.

It's a concept called Feed Forward, which was originally developed by a management expert named Marshall Goldsmith.

As far as I know, not a lot of educators are familiar with the practice of Feed Forward.

And I really think if we learned how to do it and started using it more consistently,

it could make a huge difference in how our students grow and how we grow as professionals.

My guest today, Joe Hirsch, is going to help us do just that.

In his book, The Feedback Fix, Joe digs deep into the practice of Feed Forward and shows us how and why it works.

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