When to provide positive and negative feedback to students

Feedback is very important for almost everyone, and to a teacher, it may be even more important than for other people. Teachers and their students are in an almost constant feedback loop, with teachers and students giving feedback to each other in one way or another basically every day. Tests are feedback, grades are feedback, demeanor, tone of voice, facial expression, the way that you talk. All of these are ways that teachers give feedback to their students. Likewise, students are always giving feedback to their teachers as well, through similar things, such as demeanor, attitude, tone of voice, homework, class and test performance.

With all of that feedback going on, it's important to think about how to do it right, because done right, it can be a driver of success. But done wrong, it can slow you and pull you down.

So lets look at some principles of effective feedback:

1. Teachers should use both positive and negative feedback. It can be easy to forget the positive part, because our job is to help students improve. But positive feedback is just as important as negative feedback, if not more. This article from chron.com talks about some of the benefits of positive reinforcement in the workplace (which is not identical to positive feedback, but close enough). These include helping employees feel valuable, encouraging good behavior, and helping employees to fit it. Students are even more emotionally driven than employees, so they might even be more sensitive to the presence or absence of positive feedback.

2. Negative feedback should be present but not overdone. This is easy to say but not necessarily easy to do. It can seem like a delicate balance, but one way to approach it is to make sure that there is a good amount of positive feedback early on. This builds a sense of good feeling and trust toward the teacher, building a platform from which to provide negative feedback.

3. Positive feedback should be given somewhat randomly. People like rewards, but if the reward becomes predictable, it stops feeling like a reward. So build some unpredictability into your positive feedback by not always following the same pattern. If you surprise yourself sometimes, it's alsoo a good chance that you might be surprising your students as well, which is a good thing when the surprise is a good thing.

As Rosenthal and other researchers have noted, our expectations for ourselves and others have an uncanny way of turning out correct. This is known as the self-fulfilling prophecy. Feedback is one way that you communicate your "prophecy" to your students. Try to make it a good prophecy and you will have a better chance of getting the good result that you hope for.

Here's a quick-run-through decision tree for giving positive or negative feedback that I made to help myself (and you, if you would like):

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References:

Joseph, C. (2018). Why is Positive Reinforcement Important in the Workplace. Retrieved May 7, 2018, from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/positive-reinforcement-important-workplace-11566.html

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Psychology: 10 Examples and Definition ( PDF). (2018, May 01). Retrieved May 7, 2018, from https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/self-fulfilling-prophecy/

From The Positive Psychology Program