Feedback and Student Motivation
A Model Drawing Anecdote from India
By Prof. Devika S. Pathak
School of Fashion, Styling & Textiles
Pearl Academy, India
Saturday, February 13, 2016
Post 210
I had the chance to get to know of Prof.
Devika S. Pathak while I was delivering an online course on Higher Education
for Laureate International Universities’ Faculty Development. Devika’s
thoughtful insights along the course made me and –no doubt- her partners also
reflect on our current way of teaching and providing learners with feedback.
I invited her to become a guest writer
for this blog with one of her forum participations in our course, and to
honor her thoughtfulness and clarity in mind when discussing feedback
provision and student motivation, here you have a very good example of how
feedback can have a powerful effect on learners and their learning.
|
Feedbacks are an essential element of
any kind of learning. Feedbacks are
guidelines that help us evaluate knowledge enhancement and subsequent growth.
Regular inputs received by a mentor or a tutor helps us to align ourselves with
the required brief in case we go off-track , and /or strengthen and reinforce
our progress if we are on –track.
When I was a student
16-17 years ago, we had no rubrics systems of evaluation; it was just hard-core
marks assigned. I remember a certain tutor who taught us model drawing – gave
us an outdoor assignment to draw and paint trees. I had the toughest time with
that assignment (despite being good with sketching). The tutor saw my work and
said “do it again – this has no life.”
I interpreted ‘life’
in my own way, and I redid the assignment. This time round she said, “where are
the colors, give the trees depth- redo it.” So I redid the whole assignment
again with more ‘depth’ with more greens and browns and various other shades that
I could see. Finally, she took the assignment and marked me averagely and said, “you
should’ve given more depth to the trees.” Though I was marked and I did a redo
twice over but I was still unclear of what was actually needed.
When I reflect on
that incident today, I feel that as a student I was too hesitant to ask the
tutor for any further clarity on improvement. Maybe I did not understand the
adjectives used for feedback. Had I been able to ask or had my tutor been
able to explain what depth meant, what life in trees meant …. I could have had
better understanding had delivered better work too. Clearly in my case I
was a lost student (for that subject) and kept shooting in the dark to get it
right. Another point is that had the tutor been able to convey all aspects of
the feedback it would have helped.
So the feedbacks are
very crucial, it helps to communicate the criteria which have been missed.
It helps to bridge the gap between the tutors and taught; also the
learning is deeper and clearer.
Over the years as a tutor I have
realized that any kind of feedback should start with a positive comment... Then
followed by suggestions and scope of improvements. It doesn’t help to be harsh
or rude with words because it intimidates the student and he/she can go into a
shell. Rather, via our feedbacks, we need to motivate, inspire and enhance
their learning abilities.
Identifying
particular aspects of the assignment that need further improvement , or clarity
, or more case studies etc. will help the student fill in those gaps for future
work as well. A rubric helps to have a comparative study and fairly evaluate
all students along the same parameters.
For me feedback is an interactive dialogue rather than just an
association with grades. When I have a presentation assignment given to the
class, I usually follow it up with a feedback session. After students have done
all the presentations, I initiate a feedback dialogue discussing various
aspects like:
·
Was the presentation well conducted?
·
Was the presentation layout clear?
·
Was the language of communication good? (formal approach or informal
approach)
·
Was the audience engaged in the presentation?
·
Was the content informative?
Saturday, February 13, 2016
Post a Comment