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- Giving & Receiving Feedback
Image credit: FT Weekend
Most people receive feedback on a regular basis - at work, in school, or from relationships. The ability to reflect and act on feedback is key to improving. This week's post dives into how we can give more constructive feedback and help kids become better at receiving them.FT Weekend Magazine deputy editor Esther Bintliff wrote about the three stages of receiving criticism. The first is “Fuck you.” The second is “I suck.” And the third is “Let’s make it better.”
1. Framing Feedback
In the book Radical Candor, former Google and Apple executive Kim Scott wrote about the "ruinous empathy" of keeping quiet about a colleague's weaknesses. At the same time, we need to avoid "manipulative insincerity" and "obnoxious aggression". The key to giving feedback, according to Scott, is to "care personally" while "challenging directly". That's a lot of catchphrases, but the simple takeaway in the parenting context is that parents need to let their kids know what to work on, and communicate in a way such that the the child feels the feedback comes from a place of sincerity and wanting them to do better.
“My grandmother told me this when I was a child. I forget what I was in trouble for, but I was getting some critical feedback, and she sat me down and said, ‘Look Kim, if you can learn to listen when people are criticising you, and decide what bits are going to help you be better, you’ll be a stronger person.’”
Scott's grandmother was right. Bintliff pointed to research that showed that the effectiveness of feedback is to a large extent determined by whether we see it as an opportunity to grow or as a fixed verdict on our ability.
"In a 1995 study by academics from the University of California, Riverside, children were split into two groups to solve maths problems. One was informed the aim was to “help you learn new things”. The other was told: “How you do . . . helps us know how smart you are in math and what kind of grade you might get.” The first group solved more problems."
The UC Riverside study shows the importance of framing feedback as a way to help kids achieve learning goals or become better at something. Often times, without intending to, we give feedback in a way that makes a child feel like their ability is being judged. The child does not feel like they can get better at the task. Or worse, the child feels stupid, incompetent or ashamed.
"Shame is the feeling I most associate with negative feedback. When I was 10, my class was told to make small 3D buildings out of paper. I cut carefully around the outlines of a cuboid and a prism, ran a glue stick over tabs at the edges and pressed them together in sequence. Sellotape was also employed. The teacher asked us to bring the models to him. I walked to his desk and handed mine over. He gazed at it in silence. After a long pause, he said: “You’re not very good with your hands, are you?”"
According to Naomi Winstone, a professor of educational psychology at the Surrey Institute of Education, the above example of being told you are not good with your hands is generalising from a specific task. It is terrible feedback because it gives the impression that it's fixed - the person receiving the feedback will never be good. Before we think about how to help kids get better at receiving feedback, it's critical we avoid giving feedback in a way that makes the child feel they will never get any better.
“We assume that using feedback is just this amazing, in-built skill that we all know how to do effectively. We really don’t.”
2. Actionable Steps for Real Impact
Winstone believes the ability to process feedback should be developed from a young age. Her project Everybody Hurts explores techniques based on the concept of ‘intellectual streaking’ (Bearman & Molloy, 2017), which recognises the importance of teachers openly and authentically sharing their own experiences with their students. A core strategy for developing students’ feedback literacy is for teachers to share their own experiences of being on the receiving end of feedback, and how they managed this process.
Australian academic Phillip Dawson recommends pausing when receiving criticism, calming down, then rewriting the feedback into a list of actions.
“By rewriting, I’m making them tasks I assign myself. This “defangs” the feedback and allows you to take ownership of the next steps."
3. Productive Listening
Avraham Kluger, co-author of one of the seminal pieces of research in the history of feedback studies, argues that we give feedback because we hope to change the behaviour of another person. But often the person already knows there is a problem. They just lack the inner resources to fix it. Kluger recommends managers spend more time listening to their direct reports instead of giving top-down feedback. The idea being that through the process of talking about their work, the subordinate will recognise issues and make an effort to correct them. Kluger's research findings suggest that listening to employees talk about their own experiences first can make giving feedback more productive by helping them feel psychologically safe and less defensive.
It is not clear whether Kluger's approach of 'listening to help people change' works with kids. Kids may not be developed enough - cognitively and emotionally - for this approach to be effective. I am of the view that Kluger's approach of high quality (attentive, empathic, and non-judgmental) listening can positively shape kids’ emotions and attitudes, provide psychological safety, make them less defensive and more ready to accept feedback. Kluger offers a few tips to become a better listener. Keep in mind that his context is the work environment, but I believe these tips work at home in parent-child relationships as well.
Give 100% of your attention, or do not listen. Maintain constant eye contact.
Do not interrupt.
Do not judge or evaluate.
Do not impose your solutions.
Ask more (good) questions. Good questions help someone delve deeper into their thoughts and experiences. Asking “is there anything else?” often exposes novel information and unexpected opportunities.
Reflect on your listening and think about missed opportunities.
Learning to react positively to feedback is a skill that builds resilience and helps kids become better learners. It's about time we add feedback literacy to the language of learning and skill-building.
This is issue 20 of Education & Catastrophe. Would love your feedback.
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Till the next issue!