By Anjam Khan
Feedback is a common term in our daily life. It is mostly used in student life and corporate one. Feedback is about telling people what we think of their performance and how they should do it better. The synonym form of feedback is recast. Feedback can take many forms like- written, oral, formal, informal, descriptive, peer, and so on. Here a question may arise; why I claim feedback is a necessary evil. For example, if someone is really bad at writing and you are trying so hard to make him a good writer by giving feedback but he has no intention to take your words then it is pretty impossible to make him a good writer. So feedback doesn’t work in every stage of our life.
There are two types of feedback. The first one is comprehensive feedback and another one is selective feedback. Comprehensive feedback is practiced by most of the teachers and leads to a teacher who rectifies all the mistakes in a detailed note. Selective feedback applies to an instructor who prefers to fix particular bugs and avoid other bugs. Selective feedback may be provided for an error or ‘Set’ type, and will therefore regulate corrections to a few pre-selected forms. These two terms are related incoherently by scholars.
Feedback is based on the deficit model of learning. Most of the teachers or educators work on the deficit model. This is so disappointing. They believe, if the student, who is backwater than the other luminous students, can also run with them by work harder. Teachers’ expectations are so high from all of their students. But they don’t try to understand, all students are not equal. This is a matter of sorrow. Teachers create three times more pressure on their school and high school level students than the students who graduate from college and university.
We have to remember that, feedback is not constant, it is chaotic. Every instructor should go for one-to-one conferencing. They shouldn’t give feedback in front of the whole class. This may down the confidence level of the student. One-to-one feedback is more helpful. Teachers should customize feedback to student’s needs. Feedback is more than just accolades or stricture. A student may not bad at every point in his life. A mentor should find out the point where he bad at.
There are also two types of feedback that are common in all educational institutions over the world. The first one is direct feedback and the second one is indirect feedback. In the direct feedback, faculties show the mistake and describe it. In the indirect feedback, faculties just mark on the sentence or word like giving cross and they don’t describe anything. From these two types of feedback, direct feedback is more helpful than indirect feedback to the students. From the direct feedback, they come to know where they did the mistakes and try to overcome the mistakes. It is really helpful for their future path. On the other hand, students just avoid indirect feedback. They don’t care about the cross mark. They just look over the script and neglect it. And in the future, they do the same mistake cause they don’t have any idea about the correct answer. They don’t know how to overcome that. Two more important feedbacks are oral and written feedback. Oral feedback is usually made throughout a lecture and written feedback is generally given after a work. Oral feedback is often overlooked as it’s less formal, but it can be an influential and confident resource that can be easily delivered promptly.
The faculty shouldn’t throw his students in the deep water and expect them to swim. Faculty soothes students' fear of failure, and then gently plans for short-term successes. The faculty can initiate building the confidence that makes it OK to fail forward.
The writer is a student of English and Modern Language department at North South University.