Skip to main content

Feedback

By
One of the most common complaints I head from instructors is that they didn’t get any feedback from their trainer. If instructors want feedback, it’s not a stretch to say that students are looking for feedback too.

Feedback helps
  • Reinforce positive actions
  • Redirect ineffective movements
  • Keep your student emotionally invested
Feedback shouldn’t be judgmental it is imprecise and be taken personally. Get the words good, bad, right and wrong out of your vocabulary. Focus on what you see and how it relates to the student’s intentions.

For example:
Judgmental feedback: “Those turns looked bad,” “You’re in the backseat”
Objective feedback: “Do you feel how your hips drift back during the finish of the turn. It puts you in a difficult position to start the next turn,” “That last turn washed out because you looked uphill”

Make sure your feedback is welcome

Create an atmosphere of trust by showing respect and empathy

Students will be more likely to receive feedback if you ask for permission, make observations rather than judgments and checks to be sure the feedback is understood

If you are working on a task, keep your feedback specific to the task and explain how the feedback will help the student with the task

Feedback should be immediate

Feedback is useless if it isn’t personal. If you give feedback to the group people who need the feedback will ignore it and people who don’t need it will try to change something that doesn’t need changing will. Your students will appreciate the personal attention.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning Styles – Doers, Feelers, Thinkers, Watchers

By
A learning style is the way a person’s sensory, perceptual, memorial, decision-making, and feedback mechanisms operate. Or more simply, the preferred technique to approach learning. Some students have a dominant style and others are comfortable in more than one. PSIA references different theories on learning styles, this is a classic one. Doers Values active experimentation Pragmatic, practical, functional Good problem solvers, work well with others Constantly active, doesn’t like being idle and gets frustrated with too much talking Learn by experimenting, trial and error Instructor should provide experiences that will guide the child Experiential learning is an effective method for all students
3 comments
Read more

Creativity with kids

By
Sometimes, I see instructors preparing for exams and getting bogged down in all of the terminology, studying kids development literature, and others' progressions or ideas.  That stuff is important, for sure.  But in order to have a ton of fun teaching kids, we have to apply all of that professional knowledge while looking at the world through kid-colored glasses.  Yeah, the big fluorescent ones.  Like these: A few of the Liberty gang were clinic'ing with me this weekend - a kids' teaching clinic.  One of the required clinics everyone has to take each year.  Usually I make everyone sing "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" loudly while skiing at some point during these clinics.  But we never got to it. I gave each of the three groups a description of children we often see come through our programs and asked them to develop a program to share with the group.  Once they got started thinking about movements and their ideas, I bugged them to get more...
3 comments
Read more

Sarah’s Big Binder of Ski Teaching Geekery (and more!) (Updated/edited as of October, 2015)

By
UPDATE: October, 2015: This has been updated with new links, programs, and information. Please let us know if you have other references, we promise to update again before 2020! - Kerry (Diva2) Last year when I was preparing for my L3 Part 1 Skiing exam, the Dev Team Diva turned me on to these great task descriptions developed by Bob Barnes for the PSIA Rocky Mountain Division (the Pocket Summaries listed under "Skiing" below). (Kerry's edit: Those pocket summaries are not on the PSIA-RM site anymore. But I think what you're looking for is in the Skiing IDP linked below.) In my search for them online, I discovered lots of other valuable ski teaching resources tucked away on various PSIA divisional Web sites. So I printed them out, organized them into categories, and stuck them in a binder. The binder became an invaluable resource in discussions with my good friend and ski coach as I helped him to prepare for his Dev Team tryout and he coached me to success in my ski...
8 comments
Read more