Effective Feedback

Feedback is a way for instructors to offer information to students regarding performance relative to a particular task. The underlying intention of feedback is to guide students and athletes towards improving their snowboarding.

Many instructors are very well practised at delivering stock expressions to their students to ensure they meet an expected framework for delivering feedback. In the same way that students learn in different ways, they also respond and develop at varied rates depending on the type of feedback they receive. Thought and consideration should be given to this to help maximise the effectiveness of teaching.

A simple example of how feedback can be adjusted, is verbal or nonverbal. It’s obvious to understand that verbal feedback is usually in the form of spoken words from the instructor. Non-verbal feedback can take the form of body language or gestures. A great example here is a thumbs up.

Let’s take a closer look and explore other types of feedback that are prominent in the snow sports industry.

Positive & Negative Feedback

When considering the form your feedback delivery takes, one of the most common misconceptions is that it should always be positive. Think of the positivity of your feedback as a spectrum or a scale. At one end you have positive and the other you have negative.

It’s possible to present any type of feedback in both a positive and a negative way, or somewhere in between. Different students will enjoy varying approaches here. Some may respond well to constant positivity and fully committed stoke, regardless of how they are actually performing. Others may find this constant positivity too false and may prefer a more neutral approach. Some students, albeit only a few, can even respond well to a slightly negative, hard-line approach.

It is often best to begin with a fairly neutral approach and adjust as the student-teacher relationship grows. Remember, that when receiving feedback the underlying intention is for a positive end result in order to progress and develop.

One of the most effective ways to practise changing your delivery of feedback is to consider how you receive feedback when you are the student. Receiving feedback can challenge the recipient in many ways. It may shatter confidence and trust or it could build abilities and overall stoke. As a recipient of feedback you can’t do much about the delivery but you can always consider ways in which it could have been phrased more appropriately to suit your needs.

Intrinsic & Extrinsic Feedback

A great place to start understanding feedback is to consider that it’s possible for feedback to be delivered to the student/athlete by an external source, such as the instructor or coach, and from an internal source, such as our proprioceptors. These types of feedback are known as extrinsic (external) and intrinsic (internal).

Intrinsic feedback is information received by the student as a direct result of producing a movement through the sensory perception and proprioception pathways, such as feelings from muscles, joints and balance. ​​It is important for both the student and instructor to understand that this is happening when practising movements. As the student’s awareness increases, they will be able to refine the movements by themselves. The instructor’s role here is to aid the student’s interpretation of this intrinsic feedback.

Extrinsic feedback is information that comes from an external source, such as the instructor, a video, or even watching another student. It may or may not be built into the movement itself, but it should help the student to create a mental picture of what the movement or activity should look like.

Augmented feedback represents a collaboration between the student and the instructor, where the instructor adds or adjusts information that the student perceives about their performance. It is intended to improve the intrinsic feedback loop within the student. This type of feedback is easier to understand when you consider the simple idea of offering feedback to help improve a movement after the student has attempted it. Once provided, the hope is that the new movement will be committed to muscle memory through practice and continually successful results (e.g. remaining balanced throughout a toe turn) and measured through intrinsic feedback (e.g. even stability over the balls of both feet).

See Seek-Give-Seek and Question-based Learning for more reading on this.

Initial & Delayed Feedback

Timing is everything!

This expression is highly relevant to delivering feedback, especially in the sporting world. There are two main types of feedback relative to timing: initial and delayed.

Initial feedback occurs as soon as the student has finished their performance or upon completion of a task. This could be when the student/athlete has stopped sliding or even when a particular movement within their riding is complete. Often, when initial feedback is offered it’s very easy for your student to attach it to sensations, responses in their snowboard and hopefully some successes. This type of feedback is very useful in moving from the cognitive to associative stage of skill acquisition (see the Stages of Skill Acquisition).

Delayed feedback occurs when there is a period of time between skill execution and delivery of feedback. This can be useful to allow the student’s experience to solidify and for the instructor to seek a better environment in which to deliver the feedback, such as a chairlift. Depending on the amount of delay your student may or may not remember the situation you are offering feedback for. It’s possible to cause confusion between some similar situations that your student may have experienced and worse still, the feedback now has no relevance due to the natural progression of your student. That being said, delayed feedback offers opportunity for more discussion and self reflection, which helps students move from the associative to autonomous stage of skill acquisition.

For less experienced instructors and coaches, it’s important that initial feedback is provided every time a student or athlete attempts the presented task. This should give the student confirmation that they understood and are achieving the task. This can be as simple as: “That’s it, you got it first time! Try it again to make sure.” Alternatively, it may be a reminder of something they have missed or could use a little more: “Remember to lead with your knee.”

An experienced instructor or coach will move between initial and delayed feedback throughout lessons, often without giving it much thought. However, taking the time to self reflect on why the chosen feedback type was used, helps us to continually fine-tune our feedback delivery.