Feedback is important to give and receive. It promotes motivation and it strengthens learning. But it can be difficult to give so that it is received constructively by the recipient of the feedback.
Feedback helps keep performance and collaboration on track and benefits motivation, learning, collaboration, efficiency and the sense of self-respect and fairness.
Well-delivered feedback can e.g.:
- Improve learning outcomes and motivation to learn.
- Influence how new goals are formulated and met. Increase ambitions and performance
- Increase the possibility of individuals discovering their strengths and still room for improvement
- Improve learning opportunities by strengthening individuals’ self-awareness
- Increase engagement – when you are seen and recognized or corrected, you know that the emphasis is on what you do or stand for.
In general, 2 types of feedback are generally distinguished:
Positive feedback
Positive feedback is often feedback that leads to reinforcement and confirmation of the observed behavior rather than seeking to correct errors. This type of feedback gives the recipient knowledge of what others experience as good and constructive in his or her behavior. This reinforces the behavior that the recipient of the feedback is already good at and that is part of their “light” behavior.
Negative feedback
Negative or critical feedback is information that corrects, shapes and seeks to manage past or present behavior. Negative feedback involves a person telling someone about how his or her behavior differs from a desired behavior in relation to, for example, agreed goals or expectations.
Many thinks of positive feedback as “positive communication” and negative feedback as “negative communication” and prefer to benefit from positive communication. But Negative feedback is not to say something negatively.
An example of Negative feedback could be that as a teacher in the meeting with senior students, about whom one could have assumed, you show up with low expectations of your own learning potential in relation to learning how to use IT equipment.
“I can imagine that there is someone here who is unsure whether they can learn to use a computer/program. On the other hand, I am sure you can, all of you.
There’s been a lot of people here who have been sitting with the same feeling that I think you’re sitting with right now.
Studies show that most people find it easy to accept concrete feedback.
The relationship always plays a role when one person gives feedback to another. So when a teacher gives feedback, it will often seem more violent than if two students give each other feedback among themselves.
Whoever gives feedback should have enough self-awareness to know where you think it can be difficult to be clear and accurate about the precise feedback you want to give.
It’s easy to talk for so long, thoroughly and “woolly” that the person receiving feedback doesn’t understand the message. Perhaps you find it uncomfortable to provide critical feedback, and therefore you straighten out and add small words like “maybe”, “a little” and “of course not always”. It also makes the message imprecise for the recipient.
Get ready for where the typical challenges of learning and skills acquisition are for most senior students. Continuously note and collect the experiences you gain as a teacher from the courses you complete. Prepare and practice in different ways you can deliver good, concrete, useful and constructive feedback to future students.
Overall, many teachers have to practice meeting the senior student with respect, equality and not talking down to. One should refrain from thinking of older students as someone to take special care of. You must meet the older student – as a student. As someone who wants to learn something on an equal footing with other students.
It is always a good starting point to ask students whether there are special considerations or challenges that you as a teacher need to be aware of in order for the student to learn what the student would like to learn. If you do this, you will often find in a senior course group that there are probably often people who want to respond among senior students; that they have hearing aids or have not gone to school for 50 years. More often than you will hear among younger students. The older student is not more complicated. Then, as a teacher, you know something about the student’s learning prerequisites and take it into account.
