Feedback and Creativity

This is a quick entry before I go off to make volunteers look like victims:


Last night at the Missouri Hope (disaster exercise) training, we discussed the model of learning we use in the exercise: Put the team into an unique and overwhelming situation, step aside to see how they handle it, and advise when they get stuck.

The key, however, is that how you give the feedback is vitally important, because insensitive feedback can create problems in the disaster scenario and, worse, hinder learning and the willingness to develop further.

For example, "You could do better" is content-free, offering a judgement without supplying any advice.

Obviously, "That was a stupid thing to do" merely insults the learner and suggests they may as well not try again.

"That was good, but ..." People ignore everything before the word "but", so it sounds much like #1 above.

"Don't do that?" Just don't do that.

Good critiques inform the client factually of corrective actions. "It would work better here if you would ..." or "Think about ..."

The training session had me reminiscing to that moment in my college poetry class where I quit being creative for many years: The time my poetry professor called one of my poems "greeting-card trash".  Now that I'm older, I realize that not even professors are infallible, and many are just plain mean and ugly. But at age 20, I took it so hard that I didn't let anyone read my work for years.

I still wrote, but in hiding, only lsharin my stuff in that brief stint as singer-songwriter (until I divorced my guitarist). I had lost the joy of creating, and I started my career as a professor with very little balance. I had become half of myself.

It took marrying Richard, I think, to bring me back to my creative self. The strange thing is that Richard is an aspiring writer, but doesn't think he's creative. He is; just not as flamboyant as I am. He loves being silly, and I think he should write children's chapbooks with illustrations for the rest of his life. In that atmosphere, my creativity came back, because I could try new things in a safe atmosphere and use feedback to hone my skills.