Getting feedback on your feedback

• What do you remember from times when feedback was received well?
  • Was there a delivery mode that was preferred over others?
  • Were you given particular praise/feedback for something you did to make your feedback successful?
  • Was there anything different than usual? (this could be the setting, mode of delivery, timing, emotional state, etc.)
• What do you remember from times when feedback was not received well?
  • Do you remember cues where the feedback started going wrong?
  • Were you given a response that gives you hints why the feedback wasn’t received well?
  • Do you have ideas on how you may be able to turn around a situation and improve a feedback session despite a bad start?
  • Was there anything different than usual? (this could be the setting, mode of delivery, timing, emotional state, etc.)

Communicating feedback clearly and understanding its impact is a key part of teaching, and improving your practice around giving feedback will put you in a good position for future teaching roles. But to understand how you are doing one of the key things you need is feedback – so feedback on your feedback. Unfortunately, inbuilt mechanisms for getting feedback on feedback are rather sparse in contemporary teaching, so you have to actively consider this in order to identify this information. One of the ways to get feedback on feedback is to look for signs in student work – have they taken on board your feedback and has it allowed them to evolve their work effectively? While this is the greatest validation that your feedback is doing what it is meant to (changing student practice), it can be difficult to identify, being filtered through student work, and your visibility or their communication of that work. You may wish to consider other methods for seeing how your feedback is absorbed by students which are more direct.

• At the end of a direct feedback discussion make sure to ask students ‘what questions do you have?’ or ‘what are your next steps?’ to see if the information you have provided has been clear to them and given them a clear direction.
• Make use of collective feedback interactions (discussed above) to see whether general feedback comments are commonly understood, or whether there are questions and consequently clarification needed.
• Reinforce your openness to follow-up on assignment feedback. While this does require additional communication, by seeing what questions students have you can identify what elements of your feedback practice you may need to adjust.

There are many reasons why audio feedback is a great option over plain text feedback, but the key two are that it’s faster and that it allows you to communicate tone, which significantly decreases the mental load of writing feedback as you can worry less about how individual comments will be perceived by students. As you can record audio feedback with a single extra click in the Canvas Speed Grader there are no tech barriers here, only a few changes in practice to get into this new mode. You can read more about it in this piece about audio/video feedback.

We recommend giving it a try if you can. Ask your subject coordinator whether they would be ok with it. If this is a practice you can try and embrace, you will actually be putting yourself in a good place for future teaching practice which is increasingly moving in this direction.

Collecting together all you have considered and reflected throughout this collection, take a moment to think about how the following questions might shape your feedback practice moving forward.

Teacher viewpoint

• What are the modes of feedback delivery you want to use/avoid?
• What are feedback techniques you want to use/avoid?
• When/ at which intervals would you like to implement feedback?
• How do you want to provide feedback?
• What content do you want to include in your feedback?
• How do you want to see learning from feedback put into action?
• What have you learned about emotions involved in the feedback process?