Week 8 Comments and Feedback

The feedback I have been receiving in the past few weeks have been very useful. The feedback from students allow me to gauge how popular my blog is and how engaged people are with my writing. One thing I appreciate about what people are saying about is how descriptive my author's notes is and that is very useful for allowing readers who are not familiar with the western works to engage with why I chose my story line. Overall all of the comments are very much appreciated and I feel great when somebody else other than the professor appreciates my writing. Looking forward, I will spend more time on my author's notes and talk a little bit more about how themes from a certain story relate to the themes in the Indian epics and how that relates to my life in the west.

For my image I chose this picture because I like how the light helps the cat sees the way ahead just as other people's feedback allows me to gauge my writing and my progress.


source

Feedback Strategies: Pro-praise - Pat's thoughts

I chose to read an article about the language that helps kids grow, preshoolers and praise, and then another article about the negative consequences of too much praise, criticizing praise.

I found both articles really interesting and the article by Alfie Kohn , criticizing praise, brought up an important issue that I never considered before when I praised others. Kohn's idea basically states that feedback, if given too much in our culture, can become superficial and is meant to bring elicit a certain response rather than train the mind. The author further extends that our culture indulges too much in praising for things that people should already do. Although I am a proponent of praising, I do see Kohn's point in superficiality. I realized that during the summer time Albert is in charge of giving feedback to other students based upon their nightly reports of how they did during the day. Based upon what I have witnessed, I think that praising people opens up their minds to feedback and is therefore effective when getting the message across.

The next article,  preshoolers and praise, is really fascinating to me. I really like the idea of replacing 'generic praises' with more tailored phrases according to the individual. These concepts will serve me well during the summer time as I think about positive things to tell Albert on his attitude. I think that both articles are useful, and that to praise genuinely and tailored to the individual is the most effective form of feedback.

image taken from giphy

~pat

Feedback Thoughts

6 bad mental habits
silencing the critical voices

The articles are spot on! My favorite one is silencing the critical voices because it emphasizes the importance of positive thoughts! For the past two years in college I have had the opportunity to run my own business during the summertime with Southwestern Advantage and develop leadership and communication skills. The primary concept that Southwestern teaches their students is the importance of positive self-talk. Everyday during the summer time whether its through the rain, heat, empty, and negative feelings of self-worth, the convictions of positive self-affirmations have served me in the program and outside of the program in my daily life.
The other article, 6 bad mental habits, is also pretty cool. It is so important to not get hung up on the negative image we can have on ourselves and I think when it comes to handling feedback it gets kind of tricky. One way that I like to look at feedback is by viewing it as 'constructive.' It is so humbling to realize that I cannot see everything and appreciating others for helping me see my blind spots. It is so important to assess situations constructively and the idea of feedback is great because there are many things I am blind to in my work and life.



Photo was taken on my phone and captions were created with group me (I started a conversation with myself so nobody would notice that I’m making Patrick memes (not that it matters but that’s how this picture was formed))