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Giving feedback
The links and materials in this section relate to giving constructive feedback to tutees, and how to increase the chance that they will hear your messages and engage with the feedback.
It is widely recognised that feedback to the learner is a key aspect of the learning process. There is now an extensive literature and excellent advice on good practice in relation to feedback on students’ academic work. Personal tutors may well find themselves engaged in giving feedback to tutees on their academic performance (though perhaps rarely on individual pieces of work, more typically on general patterns of performance).
To be effective, feedback must not only be given: it must be ‘heard’ and acted upon. There are well-recognised barriers to learners engaging with feedback. Of course, the feedback must be clear and comprehensible, couched in language which the listener will understand. However, there are other, powerful, emotional barriers to engaging with feedback. It can be perceived as personally threatening in many ways and, in self-defence, the learner may reject it without even being fully aware of doing this. The skills of giving feedback are largely about overcoming this rejection and supporting the learner in accepting the feedback and acting on it.
Learners also rely on feedback to learn about themselves as social actors: how others perceive them; whether they ‘come across’ as helpful; constructive and engaged; or negative, bored or passive. Personal tutors may also feel it valuable at times to offer feedback on how a tutee’s attitude and behaviour is perceived by others. This can feel like a more difficult task for the tutor, as an invasion of the student’s personal space. Unlike a piece of coursework, students can see their behaviour as an essential part of their personality and quickly become defensive.
Helping students to act on feedback often means helping them plan their next steps (see Supporting planning and objective setting).
The handout below explains how to make it more likely, in any circumstances where you need to give individual feedback, that your advice is accepted and acted upon. It goes through several techniques which can be learned and adapted, and is useful for mentors, line managers and supervisors as well as for personal tutors.
The videoclip below shows a tutor carefully helping a student recognise a gap in her skills, which is revealed as a clear pattern in feedback she has received from different tutors but of which she is not fully aware, or has not yet felt the need to confront.
Scenario 1: Identifying skills gaps
The videoclip below shows the same tutor in a different feedback scenario. Here the academic performance of the student is clearly below what is required, but the tutor needs to explore the reasons for this before he can help the student to determine how to improve.
