Fighting with Feedback

Reading Punished by Rewards has really thrown me off. It lists so many things not to do when giving feedback but doesn't provide any decent replacements. The author says to stop grading, to stop praising, to stop punishing but doesn't give any helpful ideas about what to do instead. I feel like everything I do is wrong so I find myself tempted to do nothing. Feeling like a failure for every idea I have sucks. Not a helpful place to be. I need to move forward with something, even if it isn't perfect. I also need to remember there are many schools of thought in education and they all have merit and all have problems. I can't change my entire teaching style because of one book. There is merit in keeping the main structure that I have set so students know what is going on. If I want to make major changes I shouldn't do it in the middle of a semester. And since no ideas are provided of how to change, that book is only so useful.

I'm doing better at giving feedback in a neutral tone. And I've been using a lot of self-evaluation with my advanced class. After run-throughs and performances last week we discussed what went well and what could be improved. I also had each of them pick on thing to work on for the next performance and used that as a focus during warm-ups. They were more aware of the show and were able to make fast adjustments to fix problems during the show. And they could speak to things that I couldn't, like the amount of talking backstage. Being able to celebrate things they noticed and come up with what needed to be improved gave them a sense of ownership I've been looking for them to have. As we start our next show, I'm hoping I can rely on them to critique themselves as well as take my direction. I'm going to keep moving forward with giving feedback as a group instead of all of it coming from me.