Linking Feedback with Planning Activities

You can’t seek meaningful feedback unless you have an idea of what your goals and objectives were in the first place.

Setting Objectives

Let’s consider the following typical scenario to consider the link between objectives and feedback.

Establishing goals and turning them into detailed objectives usually starts with agreeing on business or organization-related medium-term or long-term goals with your manager on an annual basis. You then turn these into detailed objectives on a weekly and daily basis in order to achieve the medium and longer-term goals.

Feedback will usually be related to your performance in achieving your objectives and goals and can be given in regular catch-ups or formal appraisals with your manager. Of course, feedback isn’t restricted to your manager, you may receive feedback from others too.

Some elements of goals are more to do with your personal and professional goals and we will be returning to these later in the course.

Objectives for Volunteering

When you first arrange your STEM volunteering activity, in collaboration with the educational lead (teacher or youth group leader), you will have outlined what the objectives are for the activity. At this early stage, you are using feedback in your discussions with the educator you are working with, to help you assess that you broadly have the right knowledge and skills for the activity. You will then go on to plan the activity in detail.

In the previous courses, we used the activity planning template to create your activity plan and indicate the learning outcomes for the activity. The activity plan is also the best place to consider how to gather feedback and who the best people are to get it from. Continue to work on the activity plan you already have. If you need a new copy of the template, you can access that here:

• Activity planning template [Word doc].
• Activity planning template [Create a Google Doc].

Task

In this course you will be focusing where and how you collect feedback on your volunteering, considering: the activity; yourself; feedback for your employer; feedback for your volunteering programme.

Identify the areas of the activity you will be focusing feedback on. Think about the outcomes of the activity, what it is trying to achieve with the young people you work with. This will help you narrow down what you collect feedback on to help you assess how successful or not your activity was in enabling those outcomes to be met.

On your activity plan, use the space provided for feedback on the activity to make some initial notes on how you might gather feedback. Don’t worry about the detail yet, as you’ll pick up more ideas through the course.

Remember that your activity planning template will form part of your ExpertTrack Portfolio, so keep it safe and updated.