A Great Way to Give Feedback: Two Stars and a Wish

Abstract

Feedback in medical education is an integral and important constituent of teaching as it encourages and enhances the learners’ knowledge, skills and professional performance.1 To integrate the concept of feedback in medical education, training of the trainers pertaining to techniques of adult learning and how to give feedback to trainees are foremost requirements.2 Feedback was highlighted as one of the weak area which needed particular attention.3 Provision of timely constructive feedback is pivotal in enhancing learning of students as it allows students to practice their knowledge, adjust, modify and grow.4 It is also probably helpful for both teachers and students to start using the phrase “feed-forward†as this encourages both teachers and students to focus on future learning.1 It is widely recognized that feedback is an important part of the learning cycle, but both students and teachers frequently express disappointment and frustration in relation to the conduct of the feedback process.5
“Two stars and a wish†is an exceptional feedback approach where peers give two constructive remarks (stars) and make out an area of enhancement (wish) to one another. It is a decisive appraisal technique from peers. It helps us to gain knowledge of more about personal Development plans. It gives an insight into the personal development and raises the values of performance.6 clearly, the “stars†help one to recognize good points about personal growth, whereas, “wishes†help to recognize and construct a response to the deficiencies. Thus, this strategy has the possible of identification of strengths and limitations from near peers or students responses.7
In this Editorial, “Two stars and a wish†exceptional feedback approach is explain stepwise. First feedback regarding Peer- A is taken from his peers and students then wrote all received stars and wishes. Afterwards, prepare word clouds of statements for starts and wishes separately, which can be identified easy by using online tool named as TagCrowd. This tool can be used for making word clouds. Which would give us an opportunity to arrange words randomly using different colours. The online tool helps in showing the important words bigger than others. Thus, word clouds help in the identification of patterns and attributes that are more important graphically. This diagrammatic representation of data is an influential tool for recognition of codes and themes.
This will be followed by making a mind map of the interface of different statements and words with the most important theme and or word. In addition, wishes and stars will be linked through each other to identify common and different codes and or themes.
All the observation from all respondent peers were tabulated anonymously. This gave the chance to go through all the responses and find what friends and students said about Peer-A. In general, the stars were very encouraging as they helped to learn about Peer-A. Better good skills was the most commonly used word from all the respondents (Figure 1). Which shows that it is the strongest suite of Peer-A. Furthermore, data predict that Peer-A is confident, cooperative, helpful and hard working. Cloud data suggested some wishes regarding Peer- A. The most prominent wishes among them for Peer- A was need improvement in communication, self-regulation, over ambitiousness tolerance, rudeness and need to organize himself (Figure 2).
However, Peer- A plan to work on this and want be less possessive and more accommodative. In addition, Peer- A has been told that he is overconfident and he need to refrain from unnecessary conversation because he is too talkative and anxious management. Peer- A has plan to take this seriously as part of his personal development. The interactions in mind map revealed from intriguing interactions. Good skills as a star and improvement in communication and anxious management as a wish emerged as main themes (Figure 3). Interestingly, most of the other attributes revolved around them.