Monday 2 November 2015, room HG21, Heslington Hall, 12.30-2.00pm
The next Forum workshop will be run by Cathy Dantec and Bill Soden and will explore the theme of ‘Rethinking feedback in light of the York pedagogy’.
Cathy and Bill would like participants to consider the following questions before the workshop:
- What do you include under the term feedback, and what do you think your students understand by the term feedback?
- Are there aspects of your feedback practice that you have changed / developed in recent years, or aspects of feedback practice that you would like to change?
Please think about these questions and add any comments to this post. Specific points will not be focused on during the workshop.
York Learning & Teaching Forum 
Apologies for the late contribution, I was called out to work in Shrewsbury at short notice over the weekend.
1. I consider feedback to be any comment, guidance or advice, formal or informal, subtle or direct given on an individual’s work. Work can mean a presentation, essay, or contribution to a discussion. It can come in various directions, between peers, student to teacher and vice versa. Feedback must be advice that the student can benefit from in the future rather than retrospective description as Dylan (2014) argues ‘if students do not use the feedback to move their own learning forward, it’s a waste of time’. I believe many students believe feedback to be restricted to the formal type provided in essay and assessment marking and end of term reports.
2.I put a lot of effort into responding and adjusting teaching sessions according to feedback received though this has traditionally only been received retrospectively at the end of semester or academic year even. When providing feedback I try to make it as tailored as possible to the individual in question.
I would like to change my practice to establish mechanisms to receive feedback from students on teaching sessions more pro-actively rather than it accumulating to the end of the semester. This provides the opportunity to make timely adjustments to teaching which can contribute to enhanced student satisfaction. Likewise as a provider of feedback I will make efforts to make it more ongoing rather than it being provided retroactively at the end of term.
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Thanks for this Matt, it fitted quite well with the broad definition of feedback we wanted to use in the workshop. I think we lose sight of the importance of feedback to the teacher which you emphasize here, so would like to see this foregrounded more.
There was also some discussion in the workshop about student expectations around feedback, and one idea that was pushed was to raise student awareness of the many informal ways they can get formative feedback, rather than simply focusing on formal written comments.
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