Feedback Strategies

Feedback Padlet

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The growth mindset, and feedback in general, are crucial aspects to ones education at any age. Whether in the classroom or in the office, feedback is essential if we want to continue progressing on our course to be a better and more educated student/worker. Though giving feedback is crucial, not many people are able to give feedback effectively. In Gravity Goldberg's article "Be a Mirror: Give Readers Feedback That Fosters a Growth Mindset" she gives some qualities of feedback that foster a growth mindset which I think I can incorporate into my giving of feedback. The quality that most stuck out to me was to focus on what the reader is doing, not missing. I think it is very common and easy to give feedback that says "This would have been perfect if X happened." She states that a mirror cannot reflect what isn't there, and I think this is the perfect analogy A lot of times we like to say that X should have happened, but sometimes if X was actually implemented, the project as a whole could have actually been worse. Instead of looking for ways to improve something by adding, we need to improve things that already exist. Similarly, in Marshall Goldsmith's article "Try Feedforward Instead of Feedback"  he mentions that we can change the future, but not the past, as well as that it is more productive to help people learn to be right than prove they were wrong . This means that we should focus our feedback in ways that help the individual without sole focusing on what went wrong. Like my previous example, we shouldn't say "You did Y and that was wrong. Really, Y was a terrible idea and it hurt your project as a whole. You should have done X." Rather, we should mention Y briefly, but not dwell on it, and mention how X is a strong strategy and could be very useful. This allows for the individual to focus on the future (the benefits of using X as opposed to Y) and not dwell on the past that cannot be changed.