Feedback Strategies

(Image Source: Pixibay)

 Article 1: How to Give Feedback Without Being a Jerk

At first, I really did not agree with this article. When I was being taught how to edit my peers' work in school, the method teachers always wanted us to use was the standard "feedback sandwich". I have personally used and enjoyed success with this strategy at many point and thought it was very good. This article claimed that this strategy is good only fo the one issuing the feedback and rarely for the recipient. Once that clarification had been made, I began to see the error in my though process: the sandwich was good for me but I wasn't paying attention to how it helped my peers. In hindsight, when I would edit the same students' papers multiple times I would often find similar mistakes from one revision to the next. Before not I had just considered it lazy writing, but I am now compelled to ask whether it was my inefficient feedback which may have resulted in repeated errors. I would often praise the aspects of the paper I truly did appreciate, but I did so from a mindset not of showing appreciation; instead the mindset was mollification. All this considered, I intend on applying the more open discourse of editing and feedback in areas of my life to see if they do work better!

Article 2: How to Provide Feedback When You're not in Charge

What I most enjoyed about this article was the dissection of the different forms of feedback. I have never considered appreciation as a form of feedback, but this article provides a good argument supporting that idea. Appreciation is essentially purely positive feedback which serves to highlight what one did well at a task. Somewhat related to this idea is coaching. Coaching as feedback is meant to show how one could improve on what they are already doing well. This could mean pushing a writer to the next level or an athlete to scoring higher or running faster. In all these cases, the person is doing good, but coaching shows room for improvement regardless of the level one is at. The final form of feedback is evaluation, the most involved form of feedback. Evaluation is meant to show either where one is doing something wrong and needs to change or is how a person performs in relation to others. These may seem very different, but they are not inherently. In many ways, the most difficult aspect of performing is relation to others and improving that can improve many aspects of how one performs in any given situation.

Thoughts on Feedback

 Feedback Articles

(Image Source: Wiki Commons)

One aspect of the article "A Fixed Mindset could be Holding you Back at Work" by Anna Kelsey-Sugg and Ann Arnold, that I found most interesting was how excessive positive feedback results in a brittle person incapable of overcoming adversity. The part of this most intriguing was the usage of the word brittle, primarily for the mental image it conjures of one's mind literally breaking. Having come from an environment which was most definitely contributing to excessive positive feedback, I can understand how accurate this image it. Oftentimes when confronted with. a situation where one does not believe that a chance at success exists, it is very easy to simply shut down. and this applies even more in situations of feedback where it appears as if someone is actively criticizing your work. In those situations, it is antural to throw up barriers both to defend oneself from criticism and to help keep you form having to do the thing which you were criticized for in the first place ever again. 

Retaliation to negative feedback is a prominent theme in Tim Herrera's article "Why it's so Hard to Hear Negative Feedback" and focuses primarily on people's defensiveness in the face of negative feedback. In the article, Herrera cites several studies which show people actively avoid feedback for fear of getting critiqued. The primary reason for this, as the studies suggest, is because people do not tend to believe that other are actually actin in good faith. Instead, they fear that people are being overly critical with the intent of tearing one another down. From personal experience, I can wholly understand this sentiment. When a peer edits your paper, one's inclination at the first critique is to see how they were wrong to say what they did and to defend your own answer; not because they necessarily are wrong, but because the very fact they say there is something which needs editing implies they are trying to critique the person and not the paper.