My Thoughts on Feedback Stategies

For this post, I chose to write on Deborah Maue's Giving Creative Feedback -- A Guide for Those Who Aren't Creative and Youki Terada's A Troubling Side Effect of Praise. I found Maue's article very helpful for evaluating the creative work of others while being a rather uncreative person myself. I am not creative at all and so I sometimes struggle with evaluating other people's work and creativity, either because I simply do not understand why they went a certain route or because I feel like I have insufficient creativity myself to judge others' creative work. This is especially true when it comes to writing. I myself am not a great creative writer so I have problems with evaluating other people's writing, which I can already tell I might struggle with in this class as we do this a lot in the comments assignment each week. I am getting better at giving helpful feedback but the steps Maue lays out for evaluating creative work are helpful as they help one to remove hasty impressions from feedback and make the whole process more constructive. Her steps really stress taking a step back and learning about why someone chose to go the route they did in a project. She also emphasizes paying attention to the big picture, which I think is extremely important, especially in storytelling.


As far as Terada's article goes, I enjoyed learning more about another study on growth mindset. Similar to Dweck's study with children being praised for being smart or for putting in a lot of effort (those who were told they are smart were less likely to try harder problems than those told that they had tried hard), in the study Terada discusses, the children praised for being smart were more likely to cheat than those praised for working hard. Growing up in the public school system, I know how intense the pressure of keeping up grades and appearing smart is for students. I remember one teacher telling my class that, in her experience, top students are more likely to cheat, which I think lends credibility to the whole growth mindset idea and illustrates exactly what is shown in the two studies mentioned above (ie, that students who are praised for being smart tend to not want to challenge themselves or even cheat so as to maintain the appearance of being smart). I think it is incredibly sad that students are still being trained through praise this way and agree that focusing more on effort and the process of learning is more valuable than focusing on right answers or good grades. My own education would have been much more meaningful if this had been the case in the schools I attended in middle school and high school.

Having read Maue's article and other articles over giving and receiving feedback and after browsing past students' feedback, I feel much more confident about giving feedback in this course. I appreciate helpful comments when it comes to writing (especially as I struggle with creative writing in particular) and look forward to helping others make their stories even better through constructive feedback over the course of this semester.

Image from cheezburger.