Asking for Feedback

Yes, a facilitator can ask the group or individual learners for feedback, either verbal or written. When you ask learners for feedback, you are making some assumptions:

• They are willing to give feedback.

• They know enough about facilitation to provide meaningful feedback.

• You know how to ask or frame the questions that will provide meaningful feedback.

• You are willing to make changes based on the feedback.

• The feedback received is representative of a larger group of learners participating in this delivery.

Basic Rule 41

If you are not going to act on the feedback, do not solicit it.

When giving verbal feedback, learners often have a difficult time providing honest, constructive feedback. There is group pressure not to be too critical. When asked, they may respond, “Things are going fine,” or “Everything is going great.” In some cases, they point out things beyond your control, such as “PowerPoint slides need to be more creative,” or “Use a different color or larger text on the slides,” or “Guides have misspelled words,” or “Content is not relevant to my job.” These issues are important because they are interfering with learning, but this feedback doesn’t help you be a better facilitator at that precise moment. When this happens, take this feedback to the course designer/developer so he or she can make appropriate changes. You want to facilitate this change so you have a quality learning experience to facilitate.

One organization asks for verbal feedback for the end-of-course evaluation. Learners are asked to rate the course from 1–10 (with 10 being the highest), and they are asked for specific comments. The facilitator always starts with a learner who seems to be having a good experience. This learner’s answer usually nets a high rating and positive comments. As subsequent learners respond individually, the peer pressure to maintain the comments and rating is significant. So, does this evaluation provide good and reliable information? No! Does it result in good ratings for the facilitators and program? Yes! Does it produce valuable feedback? No!

Verbal feedback is further complicated by your role of facilitator, which is one of perceived influence and power. This misperception limits your ability to get honest feedback. In short, learners don’t want to say anything that may result in a bad perception of them. (By the way, the amount of influence and power learners think facilitators have with the learners’ managers is surprising. Would that it were so!)

Basic Rule 42

In general, verbal feedback does not provide reliable or useful information.

By using a form of written, anonymous feedback, you improve your chances of getting reliable information, but not by much. If questions are open-ended, you must frame them so there is little room for interpretation. Such questions are difficult to write. Once the feedback is received, you must then read each survey and do some kind of thematic analysis to see where things are going well and where changes are required. If you develop a scaled response instrument (statements with a rating scale, say from 1–4 with a descriptor for each rating number), you must contend with rater bias (learners’ tendency to rate high) and still identify the areas that are going well and not so well. And, unless you add places for comments, this approach provides only a relative score. You must interpret the score and determine actions to take.

Noted

In many cases, the course designer/developer has provided you with an interim evaluation. instrument you can use to gather feedback.