In an online class I took a few years back, I remember that we had to go through and read someone’s response to something, and respond back, but we couldn’t talk about the same thing that someone else had already mentioned. So if I wanted to talk about the person’s thoughts on a matter, but someone else already had, then I was SOL. Giving feedback when you’re restricted in that manner is hard.
That being said, feedback is generally pretty helpful (unless someone is being negative just because they want to be). When looking at the articles to read from, one of the ones I was drawn to was Deborah Maue’s article on giving creative feedback when you’re not creative. I don’t consider myself to be a particularly creative person; I’m a great consumer of arts (books, media, etc), but actually creating something is pretty hard for me, and not something I can do easily. Give me a structure to work with though, and I can go from there. This is precisely what the article does: it gives a structure to follow to help you organize and come up with constructive criticism.
Another article that I liked was How to Give Feedback without Sounding Like a Jerk, by Adam Grant. When he asked colleagues for advice on giving feedback to an older CEO, a lot of them told him to do it like a sandwich: start and end with positive feedback, and put the negative feedback in the middle. But this isn’t really effective. For one thing, it can seem condescending to the receiver. And people tend to remember the beginning and end of a conversation anyway, not the middle (this is true for anything, actually: lists, conversations, etc). So the negative feedback might be forgotten. Adam instead proposed that it was best to explain why you’re giving the feedback, make sure that you’re perceived to be on the same level as the recipient (make this seem like a conversation between equals, not information being handed down), and making sure the person wants to hear the feedback.
So, all in all, while feedback is important, presenting it properly can be difficult. In this class, since all the feedback is going to be presented in text, there are some things that’ll need to be taken into consideration, but the principles from these two articles will be much the same. Hopefully I’ll be able to improve my feedback strategies overall, not just for this class.
To be fair, cats can't read, so they don't know properly ways to give feedback. Source
1 comment:
Hi Madison!
I love your blog theme! The constellation background is so pretty.
Reading your thoughts about feedback was really interesting and your summaries of the articles you read are definitely helpful. Your summary of Adam Grant's article was especially interesting to me, since I've always used the "sandwich technique" when I give feedback! But reading through why that isn't really an effective technique made sense, and the recommendations on how to give better feedback were really useful.
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