1.1 Why can feedback be useful?
The advantage of gathering evidence from other people is that they will have a different view of you from the one you have of yourself. Drawing on this perspective can help enrich how you think about yourself.
We recognise that you may be working on this course by yourself and that it might be difficult to get feedback. If this applies to you, we recommend that you try and identify someone who might be prepared to provide you with feedback. This might be someone at work or a close friend.
If this is difficult, you might want to try some of the alternatives that are suggested by the different activities in order to get a different perspective on your qualities, knowledge and skills.
The course You and your learning focuses on gathering evidence about your qualities, knowledge and skills. If you have completed You and your learning you should have a clearer idea about these. If you have not done You and your learning, we would recommend that you do that course first as this course builds on your reflections about yourself by gaining information from other people.
Some theories, like Sigmund Freud’s (shown in Figure 3) suggest there are aspects of ourselves that we are only slightly, or not at all, aware of. Freud argued that the working of the unconscious part of the mind, those parts under the waterline in the picture of the iceberg, is almost impossible to access. These hidden aspects could contain information that might be useful for personal development.
The idea of using feedback builds on the idea that other people, because they have a different perspective, can help us to gather information that would be difficult to gather if we worked alone.
This idea has been extended and is the basis of what is called 360-degree feedback. This can be used at work to give someone as wide a picture as possible about how well he or she is doing. It involves having feedback from everyone whose views are seen as helpful and relevant.
Activity 1: Identifying feedback
Watch the animated film below. It features two characters who will appear at various points in this course – Tina and Sophie. As you watch the film, think about:
- What feedback Tina has received, and from whom?
- What feedback you might give Tina to help her in her job hunting?
Transcript: Video 1
Comment
How did you feel about working from an animation? Did if feel like ‘proper’ learning?
Hopefully you found you could focus on the characters and the interaction between them. You’ll meet Tina and Sophie again later in the course.
In this film we see and hear about Tina receiving two types of feedback. First, we hear Tina telling Sophie about the feedback she got from the interview panel. They told her that she was ‘a natural’ at handling conflict. Then, later in the film Sophie gives Tina some feedback when she tells her that she finds Tina is ‘always so very calm, even when the rest of us are stressed’.
Did you think of any feedback you might give Tina to help in her job hunting? Maybe you thought Tina should be told about the importance of reading interview preparation instructions. Whatever your views about areas in which Tina might benefit from feedback, you have now made a start on thinking about how feedback might be useful.