Co-constructing Peer Feedback Practices in an Elementary School Mathematics Classroom: An Enactivist Perspective

Feedback has been recognized as one of the most powerful factors in school achievement, and a great body of research has been devoted to studying its effectiveness. In this research, I bring together research in peer feedback and mathematics education by exploring peer feedback practices in my grade six mathematics class. Inspired by a democratic view of education, this research is premised on the conviction that peer feedback practices, like all other educational acts, must be decided by those affected by them. For this reason, my grade six students and I co-constructed feedback practices as the group engaged in feedback actions, categorized feedback, and co-constructed models of feedback. Adopting an enactivist perspective, both as a theory of knowing and as a methodology, I explored the co-construction of the groups feedback practices as feedback was enacted across three cycles of feedback actions. The goal of this research was to see how the group co-constructed feedback categories, models and actions and how conceptualization of feedback and its effectiveness evolved throughout the process. The analysis of data culminated in three detailed narratives describing, from my perspective as teacher-researcher, shared experiences of coupling across the three cycles. The process of co-constructing feedback provided the group with the opportunity for recursive linguistic coupling with one another, through which the group co-adapted and co-evolved and brought forth new possibilities for feedback categories and models. Many parallels emerged between the process of co-construction of feedback practices and the feedback practices that were co-constructed. Students conceptualization of feedback and its effectiveness evolved from content to actions and relationships. The findings of this research suggest that the power of the feedback practices rested in the fact that they were co-constructed and that the process of co-construction was one of transformation, of action, reflection, and effective relationships.