2.3 Giving Feedback
What?
You give honest, personal information to the trainees concerning how your impression is about their behaviour or performance.
Feedback is a constant process during the internship and helps to improve the performance of the trainees.
Why?
By means of feedback the trainees can determine how close they are to the intended outcome of the internship.
Feedback is one of the most important matters in supervising.
How?
| Giving feedback should be: | Giving feedback should not be: | |
| Constructive and aimed at improving performance in the future, suggesting positive alternatives, looking forward. | A way to express disappointment and anger. Only looking backward. | |
| Specific, about behaviour, about facts related to the job and related to learning, about what the trainees can do about it. | Vague, about the behaviour of the trainees in general, about many different things at the same time or about things he can’t change. | |
| Focused on the work: e.g. “What you did with that machine this morning could have caused these problems.” So: play the ball, not the man! | Focused on the person, using words like ”You are a stupid person.” ”You are always...” or ”You never do... ” | |
| Calm, describing possible (bad) consequences of behaviour with encouragement to learn and do better next time. | Angry, harsh, discouraging, emotional, only repeating what went wrong. | |
| Two-way communication, supporting the trainees in evaluating themselves and finding their own way in solving problems. | One-way communication, starting from the idea that the supervisor knows what is best for the trainees. | |
| Short but frequently (not just when things go wrong) and immediately after behaviour or the performance and direct. | Long after the problem occurred or by surprise. |
Mind!
With regular (positive) feedback from the supervisor a trainee can climb high on The competence Ladder. This tool can make people aware of their level of (in)competence.