Giving and Receiving Feedback Critical Reflection
Giving and receiving feedback can be both a rewarding and frustrating task. The rewards include a better understanding of the task through peer criticism and observation while the frustrations can come when feedback is ambiguous and not critical or focused enough.
Taking this into consideration I found that giving feedback on the blog posts of Kyra Stewart to be a rewarding process as I feel I was able to give effective feedback that had a purpose and focus. I feel that my feedback on her ILA proposal in particular should be of a great value to her moving forward. I was able to use my own knowledge of inquiry based planning to help give practical suggestions on how she could move the learning further into the hands of her students via giving them a choice of research topics while also mixing her unit into her everyday classroom instead of merely keeping it enclosed within the library walls.
The feedback I received from Samantha was short but pointed me in the right direction on how to improve and adjust my blog in the future so that if future employers search my digital footprint they will be faced with my learning journey here. I really liked her idea of a table showing my search history and this will be something I look to include when time permits to really round off the expert search sections of my blog.
Finally, in the reading by Black and Williams (2004) found in my annotated bibliography I was interested in a feedback strategy which they labelled the “hamburger method”. This was a form of verbal feedback that could easily be transported into the written form. Basically it describes the feedback you give as a hamburger. The two buns on the outside are complements about the work while the meat in the middle, the most important part of the burger, is the criticism.
A very short example of this feedback would be.
“I really liked the way your titles were clear to understand and easy to find. However your body of text under these titles was sometimes not in line with the title itself. Despite this your framework for your blog is fantastic and with small tweaks to the information you could really improve it.”
In the above fabricated example, I have given feedback in a complement, criticism, complement manner. I am unsure if this feedback strategy would be successful with older students but it is something I will be looking to test out in my own classroom in the near future with my grade 6 and 7 students.
Are Great Leaders Born or Made? 