Week 2: Feedback for Learning

Last week, you learned about growth mindset and how everyone can develop their abilities with practice, training your brain to do new things. A key component in that process is feedback: as you learn something new, you will make mistakes (that's natural!), and you need feedback in order to correct those mistakes. That's how all learning works: practice, make mistakes, get feedback, practice some more, make some more mistakes, get more feedback, keep on learning, etc.

A big problem with school, however, is that there is often more of an emphasis on grades rather than feedback. So, instead of getting feedback about your mistakes, you are punished for those mistakes by getting bad grades. After years and years of being punished for mistakes, students understandably decide that the goal is to avoid mistakes at all costs... which means you avoid learning new things. If you can get good grades for doing things you already know how to do, why run the risk of trying something new and making mistakes?

In this class, though, I want to put the emphasis on feedback for learning, without any grades. I will be giving you feedback (lots of feedback!), but I will not put a grade on any work you turn in. That's because I really want you to try to do new things, taking risks with your writing and also trying out new kinds of technology.

Will you make mistakes? I hope so! That's the whole idea: every time you make a mistake, it's a chance to learn something new. So, in the words of Neil Gaiman, I hope you will make glorious and fantastic mistakes in this class so that you can learn glorious and fantastic new things. 

Of course, it's easy to say that mistakes are a good thing... but it can still feel bad to make mistakes. Your brain is actually hardwired to respond more strongly to negative feedback; it's a biological survival mechanism, and that's okay. The crucial thing is to figure out how to move beyond that initial defensiveness in response to negative feedback so that you can embrace your mistakes and learn from them. 

So, for this week's Feedback assignment, I've selected some articles about feedback for you to read and explore so that you can start re-thinking what it means to make mistakes and to receive feedback, both positive and negative, about your learning. (Then, next week, I'll have some articles to share about the flipside of the process: giving feedback to others.)

Feedback Resources

I've created a huge collection of feedback resources here: FEEDBACK ARTICLES. What you'll find there are annotated links in a Diigo Library; just click on the title you see there to go to the actual article online. The articles come from a lot of different sources; some of my favorites are Mind/Shift, Edutopia, and Harvard Business Review. If you ever have trouble accessing an article or find a bad link, let me know! 

As you can see, I've divided the resources up into several different topic areas, and the specific areas I'd like you to focus on this week are learning from mistakes, letting go of perfectionism, and dealing with negative feedback.

Specifically, I'd like you to find TWO articles and then share your thoughts in a blog post. You can browse the Diigo Library yourself and/or you can choose from the list below of articles that I personally find really useful. Either way works; just make sure you take some time with your browsing so that you can find articles that are really useful for you (this whole assignment should take about one hour).

• A fixed mindset could be holding you back
  
• Silence the critical voices in your head
• Neil Gaiman's advice on  the creative life (source for the quote above)
• Rewire your self-critical brain 
• Why rejection hurts so much 
• How to get past negativity bias
• Why it's so hard to hear negative feedback
• Seven ways to crush self-doubt 

Your Blog Post

To finish up this assignment, write a blog post with your thoughts about the two articles that you read, along with your thoughts about feedback in general. Make sure to include the titles of the articles that you chose, plus a link to each article.

Feel free to write about anything you think is important related to receiving feedback and using it wisely. When you look back over your many years as a student, what are the most productive feedback experiences you can remember? The most negative? Think about learning beyond school too: what kinds of feedback have helped you to grow as a learner at work? in your sports and hobbies? in other aspects of your life?

Please include an image and image information in your blog post. As you look for a good image to use, you might enjoy browsing the Feedback Cats or the Feedback Padlet.

When you are ready to publish, make sure you include the phrase "Feedback Thoughts" somewhere in the title of your post, and use Week 2, Feedback as the post labels (don't forget to put a comma between the two labels).

Then you are ready to do the Declaration: