I personally feel that the process of giving feedback is one of great importance. It not only gives the individual receiving the feedback help, advice and praise but it also helps the person giving the feedback. By thinking deeply and commenting on what someone else has done it encourages you to think in more detail about your own writing and also helps you to reflect more on your previous work and notice errors for improvement through looking at other people’s opinions, feelings and work on the same, or similar, topics.
Receiving feedback on your own work can be both good and bad. Feedback allows another perspective on your work, rather than just your own, and may highlight things which you did not previously notice or think about. Receiving and acting on feedback can really aid development and encourage you to re-evaluate your thoughts, feelings and opinions and can also improve a piece of writing, if the feedback is delivered constructively. Sometimes feedback can be quite harmful. If a person is in a foul mood whilst giving feedback they may take the anger out on the person they are evaluating and deliver some destructive or unthoughtful and harmful feedback which could really knock a person’s confidence as they will most likely be unaware of how the person was feeling whilst writing their feedback. It is extremely important to leave personal issues behind and forget about them whilst constructing feedback for an individual. If you have a general dislike or do not get on with the person you are feeding back to, you must be willing to push these issues to the side whilst creating their feedback as they may cause you to create unfair and unhelpful comments on the individual’s work, which, again, may severely knock their confidence.
My personal experiences of receiving feedback have been good, for as much as I can remember, whether it was receiving feedback from a teacher, a tutor, a peer, or anyone else, I have always been able to appreciate and think about their feedback and then put these comments to good use when re-drafting my work, or even just starting a new piece on a completely different topic as some comments can be transferred between different pieces of work.
In my future I will have to use feedback a lot, for example when marking the pupils work, and I will also receive a lot of feedback aswell, e.g. when I am being assessed on placement or handing in assignments. My recent studies, reading and reflecting on feedback have taught me to be careful with how I phrase my feedback and also when I construct this feedback because, if I do not take these factors into consideration, I could unintentionally really upset or dishearten individuals. This work on feedback has also taught me to act on the feedback I have been given as it is there to help me and could really aid my performance in certain areas of the course.
