Making the most of your feedback
Session 4 R21–0811 & R21–0883, UMW
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Materials
ILOs
- discuss how feedback literacy can be useful to improve academic work
- recognise the challenges that receiving feedback raises
- practise identifying development actions from feedback
Introduction
This session will encourage learners to take a fresh look at the feedback that they receive on their academic pieces of work. By exploring how feedback can be both challenging and valuable to academic work we will look at how feedback can influence our actions so that we can develop to succeed.
Emphasise that the learners will not be asked to share any personal feedback that they have received but that using their feedback for the individual reflective activities may be useful and that it might be their reflections that they share, should they feel comfortable.
How do you use feedback?
To help us get started thinking about feedback we would like you to think about and share you own approach to and use of feedback. This could include:
- what you look for first when getting feedback
- how you deal with difficult feedback that you weren’t expecting
- how you use feedback to develop yourself
- how you prioritise different bits of feedback.
Share these in Chat or over Microphone.
Facilitators to respond to answers as they come in and to encourage discussion between the group present.
The purpose of feedback
“Gift of feedback”
Feedback is more valuable to you then your grade/mark. Your feedback will explain your grade but will help you learn and develop for your next assessment or piece of work. It will give advice on the strong areas of your work that you should continue with and areas you can strengthen your work even further.
Feedback Literacies
As you progress through your course it is valuable to develop your skills and so it is vital that you engage in a discussion about your work. One of the ways that you can do this is by engaging with your feedback so that you can see what action you need to take to improve your work.
A good example of this might be to consider how sports people prepare for competitions and how they discuss with their coaches what they might do in their race. They might look at previous races/games to analyse for errors and listen objectively to their coach (the expert) on how they might improve.
Researchers have identified three main components of feedback literacy:
- Ability to read feedback
- Ability to interpret feedback
- Ability to use feedback
We want to spend some time thinking about the challenges and difficulties we may have all faced with these three components.
Activity 2 (Part 1)
Using the Jamboard, share what you find difficult or challenging about reading, interpreting and using feedback.
Facilitators to highlight and discuss challenges as they are shared.
Activity 2 (Part 2)
Using the same Jamboard, pick a challenge or difficulty another student has shared and offer some advice or suggestions for how they might be able to overcome that challenge. Add these post-it notes in a different colour.
Facilitators to feedback with advice and to summarise the post-its from the Jamboard. Identifying similarities/differences/surprises.
Action Organiser
In this final section, we want you to have some time to work on your own feedback and put into practice all the things we have all discussed today to help you understand and act on the feedback you receive.
To help you with this, we have created an interactive Action Organiser (Share link in chat) tool that takes you through the steps needed to really engage with your feedback and use it as a learning tool for your own development.
In this tool you will be asked to consider:
- What feedback did you receive for this assignment?
- What did the marking criteria ask for?
- What did you do well?
- What do you need to improve?
- What targets will you set yourself?
- What actions will you take to achieve your targets?
- How will you know you have achieved your targets?
You can use this action organiser anytime that you would like and the links are in the course Bb space.
Invite the learners to share their next action in the chat.
Summary
One of the ways to get better at your academic work is to make the most of feedback from your lecturers on your work. This can be challenging but is possible. Feedback is more important than the grade and you can treat it as a gift and part of the dialogue that you have with your lecturers.
Wrap up the workshop by highlighting the support that is available from the Library. Include the drop-ins, online resources and Chris RLF.
