Trainers: Flood with Feedback

Need to keep your audience more on track?  Want to bump up your teaching effectiveness?  Flood them with feedback.  Feedback  is crucial to effective learning and helps both the trainer and the learner stay on track.

Gathering feedback:

·      identifies the present state of learning.

·       highlights what needs to be learned and suggests next steps.

·       monitors progress in learning.

·       helps detect problems quickly.

·       reinforces learning accomplishments.

Many adults become frustrated when learning doesn’t come easy.  They can lose their confidence in being able to master a new skill.   Without skillful feedback and tutoring from the trainer the learners may lose motivation.  Maintaining interest can become challenging.

Tips for Giving Feedback

Don’t Hesitate

Provide feedback ASAP.  This enables learners to make any necessary changes or modifications.  In addition, they are more likely to see the importance of the feedback and make the necessary connections to what they have been doing.  If the learner is not grasping a point in the lesson it may prevent additional learning as the course moves on.

Include the positive

Sometimes the feedback needed will not be positive.  If, for example, they have not followed instruction, or have seriously misunderstood a key issue, then the trainer’s feedback will naturally contain many negative points.  However, in most cases, the trainer can offer something positive in the feedback as well.

What you say and how you say it will have a lasting impact on learners.  Think carefully about tone of voice and body language in giving feedback.  Feedback is an opportunity to strengthen rapport with the learner and to provide a teaching moment.

Feedback goes both ways

Use feedback as a two-way activity.  Encourage students to voice their concerns.  The more you understand their difficulties in learning, the greater is the chance that you will be able to train them effectively and provide the right feedback in the best possible manner. 

Still learning,

Honey

Interaction Training

281-812-0211

www.interaction-training.com

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Choices that Can Stink Up Your Work Reputation

Building a good reputation is important.  Maintaining it will depend on your choices.  Your happiness, success, self-confidence and quality of life increases when you have a good reputation.  Like a degree from a university or badge from the Boy Scouts a reputation, be it good, bad, or questionable is earned.  Make a pact with yourself to earn an enviable one.

There are choices and circumstances that stink up your reputation on the job; a few can sink it.  

Be Careless with Social Networking.

On the job your online "track record" is a powerful ingredient in your overall reputation.  Never forget that content posted and made available to the public can easily be in the hands of those you work with and for.   Questionable photos include any photos that make you or others look bad.  While you may feel confident that only people you want to see it have exclusive access, there is no guarantee others can’t find a way to view them.  

Operate under the assumption that everything you post – photos and comments – will show up on your bosses desk or you mother-in-law’s mailbox.  What might seem fun or the “in thing” to do could put a bad slant on your reputation.

Talk Badly About Others You Work With

Plan on this.  Everything you tell others (even in confidence) will be repeated.  Before you know it your comments are made public.  In other words, what you say, can and will be repeated.  Hurt feelings, betrayal, and bridge burning are all possible outcomes when you talk badly about others.

Choose wisely who you vent to or blow off steam with.  It is human nature to need to do that.  If you want to manage the stress associated with work or talk about those you work with in an unfavorable light, talk to someone not on the payroll.

Listening to others you work with do a number on the character of other co-workers could backfire on your reputation.  Tell others you don’t want the burden of confidentiality and that they should assume you will share what they tell you. It will encourage their discretion and they will go searching for a new ear to bend!

Tattle Tale

If you can't get along with someone or don't like someone, don't bring all they do that you don't like to your supervisor.   Nothing will tarnish a person’s reputation more than being viewed as tattle tale.  Talking behind people's back is a coward's way to send a message.  If you need to work out something with someone go direct to them.  Someone once said “if you can’t say it to the person you are speaking of, you would be better off to not speak about it”.

Leapfrog

Jumping over your boss and cutting around them, if you are connected to your supervisor's manager, will find your reputation in jeopardy.  You might even be viewed as a political threat to everyone you work with.   Don't take steps that could undermine your boss.  Respect the chain of command.  Disrespectfulness is long remembered and not easily forgiven.

Keep the shine on your reputation and don’t engage in choices that can tarnish it.

Still learning,

Honey