Feedback Strategies: Feedforward

Image from Pixabay

Feedback can be both negative and positive but all feedback should be constructive to the work and the person that is getting feedback. Try Feedforward Instead of Feedback goes into detail about this.

Feedforward is all about changing the future and not dwelling on the past, the advice that is given is to help the person in the future, so it's showing them what to do right instead of telling them what they did wrong which people find much easier to accept.

Feedback is often taken personally no matter how it is delivered and many people find it hard to accept, where as feedforward involves no such personal critique since it discussing the future and so people find it easier to take on the advice and it would be more helpful then someone praising them in order to soften the blow of critique, this technique is known as compliment sandwich and most often doesn't work.

Praise is all well and good but as is explained in The Difference Between Praise and Feedback praise can also have a negative effect on developing children in the long run. That's not to say that you shouldn't praise your children, there are just more constructive ways to go about it.

When one is giving praise it is best to praise the process rather then the finished piece, for example, telling a child that they must have put a lot of work into their painting instead of just saying that its a nice painting and that they're very talented.

However even this form of praise can be tricky and it would be even better if parents would engage with their children by asking them questions about what they've been doing or pointing out one thing about the finished piece that they can see the child improved on. For instance, if the child plays football and the parent goes to watch they should ask the child what their favourite part of the game was or remark on how they can see that they have been practicing their kick.

Giving feedback and praise are good things, they can help people grow and learn, but only if done right and the right way is often the harder way. But this just means that the outcome of said praise and feedback will be even greater.

Feedback Thoughts: The Fear Of Mistakes

Image from Pixabay

Feedback is a tricky thing, when receiving it or giving it. People often don't like hearing feedback because it can be negative feedback and people don't like feeling like they've failed, which is why many people don't even try in the first place.

People are afraid of making mistakes, of being wrong and it holds so may people back from their true potential because they won't try. They see mistakes as a bad thing because that is what we're taught. But as this article Making Good Art explains and as Neil Gaiman says we should be making mistakes, we should be making many mistakes "because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things". Mistakes are how we learn, making a mistake allows you to look at the situation figure out what not to do in similar situations in the future or the figure out what went wrong and work to fix it for next time. Making mistakes is important.

But why is it we fear making mistakes so much? Most likely because we fear the rejection that might come with it. Rejection has been proven to cause actual pain even if it's only emotional, this is because it's been wired into are brains since people lived in tribes. It works as an early warning sign to warn us when we're in danger of be ostracised from the group which back then would have been a death sentence. This site Why Rejection Hurts So Much explains it much better and also talks about how to work past rejection.

All of this links in with Growth Mindset which I wrote about before and how we need to look forward to the challenge of a new task, including the mistakes, instead of worrying about the end result or the feedback. After all feedback is meant to help us understand what we did right or wrong and what to work on for next time.