Remote Frog

The facilitator of a feedback conversations workshop/course shared a video that kept me thinking for quite a while. The title was intended to be interpellative: Why does feedback fail?

This Harvard Business Review article, which NotebookLM summarized for me in the outline below, points in the same—or at least a very similar—direction.

So why does feedback fail?

I found it especially inspiring that it identifies three mistaken assumptions I keep in mind whenever I talk about learning, development, or feedback. Two of them hit me directly:

• Understanding learning as if the other person were an empty vessel
• Assuming that I am the source of truth: the teacher, the manager, or the person giving feedback

And there is a third derivative that also shows up a lot in professional environments:

• defining excellence without involving the person themselves

All three share the same starting point: I know better than you who you should be, what you should learn, and how you should do it. Wrong and a bit cocky, right?

That resonated with me especially because for years I taught as an associate lecturer attached to the department of specific didactics at UNED.

Freire gave this a name decades ago

Plutarch had already written that the mind is not a vessel to be filled. But it was Paulo Freire who developed this critique in a radical and systematic way with his idea of the banking model of education:

• the teacher “deposits” knowledge
• the student receives, memorizes, and repeats
• learning is reduced to transfer, not transformation

The banking model is a transmissive model: knowledge moves in only one direction. And the problem here is not only educational. It is also relational. The moment we assume the other person is empty and our task is to fill them, we stop listening

And that is why this is also about feedback

If we understand feedback through that transmissive logic, the process looks like this:

• I observe
• I interpret
• I conclude
• I tell you who you are, what you lack, and how you should change

That may look like leadership. But it is just patronizing. Useful feedback looks much more like peer learning in a safe space, with mutual trust, even when one person has a formal role in leadership, mentoring, or teaching.

This is not about giving up clarity or sliding into a comfy relativism with no impact. It is about something harder: letting go of the comfort of thinking that our job is to be right. Harder, yes, but also much more effective. When you do that, something interesting happens, sometimes even magical: you can learn from the other person, even from the position of the one who, in theory, came to teach. And when you allow yourself to learn, that is when the fun begins.

And that is also why I like peer reviews so much

I think that is one reason I have always defended peer reviews so strongly. When they are done well, they are not just a quality-control mechanism. Peer reviews, when they start from a relationship of horizontality, are an infrastructure for shared learning.

They do not work because one person corrects another. They work because they create a context for thinking together, making criteria explicit, spotting blind spots, sharing craft, and improving the work without separating learning from production. Or, as I have mentioned before, by interweaving knowledge generation and its use.

And… that’s it

I suppose that is why the video and the article landed so strongly with me. They did not give me a completely new idea. They handed back to me—wrapped in very nice packaging—something that sits very deep in how I understand learning.

If a feedback conversation is worth having, it is probably not because someone walks away with a verdict, but because both people walk away with a better understanding: of the work, of the context, of themselves, and, with a bit of luck, of each other too.