Understand What Feedback is and How to Give It

Feedback is defined as specific information that helps an individual reach a particular goal. Whether an administrator is giving feedback to an instructor or instructors are helping one another, it's imperative to understand how the process of giving and receiving effective feedback works. It's essential to clarify the goals of feedback, give specific feedback, and provide suggestions.

• Clarify Goals - Evaluations and feedback should be designed with specific goals in mind. Goals should be objective and relatable. Goals often include reaching academic standards, changing instruction styles, or improving classroom management. Goals that are too vague or encompass too many moving parts will be difficult to understand or implement.

• Be Specific - Actual feedback should be as specific as the goals. To accomplish this, the feedback should be descriptive. For example, "You're not communicating well with your learners," is vague and unhelpful. "You need to work on explaining math assignments in more detail," is descriptive and gives the instructor something specific to work on.

• Provide Suggestions - Feedback should focus on what the instructor is doing right as well as areas that need improvement. The individual giving the feedback should provide suggestions that emphasize facts and relate directly to goals that have already been clearly articulated to the instructor. Suggestions for instructors should also be aligned with desired student outcomes.

The following sections provide additional tips and strategies for providing feedback in order to improve instruction.