Learners’ feedback literacy, i.e. their capacity to seek, understand and take action on feedback to enhance the quality of their future work (Carless & Boud, 2018) is unlikely to be developed without feedback literate teachers. One of the aspects of teachers’ feedback literacy is their willingness to adapt, reflect upon and refine the feedback strategies used with students (Winstone & Carless, 2020). When educators notice that feedback does not promote student uptake or has little or no impact on student learning, they need to be willing to change their entrenched feedback practices in favour of experimentation in new pedagogic approaches. However, as teacher feedback literacy is a relatively new research area, current literature provides little insight into how these processes may occur. There is a need, therefore, to explore what motivates practitioners to enhance their own feedback practices and how the growth of teachers’ own feedback literacy may subsequently impact students as well as fellow teachers.

The aim of this lightning talk is to recount the speaker’s journey as a teacher, feedback researcher and feedback intervention designer. The talk will demonstrate how the self-reflective enquiry into feedback practices used with direct entry students at a major Australian university has stimulated the speaker to, first, undertake classroom action research and then pursue PhD study in student feedback literacy. The speaker’s reflections, supported by the review of relevant literature, have subsequently informed the design of the ipsative feedback intervention, implemented with three groups of students between February and May 2020. The intervention focused on placing student individual progress at the centre of feedback practice and providing opportunities for individual goal-formation and uptake of feedback. The talk will highlight how the process of designing and implementing the intervention has increased speaker’s interest in students’ judgements and emotional responses to feedback, thus strengthening student-teacher partnership.

References:
Carless, D., & Boud, D. (2018). The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(8), 1315-1325. doi:10.1080/02602938.2018.1463354
Winstone, N. E., & Carless, D. (2020). Designing Effective Feedback Processes in Higher Education: A Learning-Focused Approach. London: Routledge.