60-Second SoTL

Instructors’ Emotions Associated with Dialogic Feed-Forward

Episode Summary

This week’s episode features an open-access article from Teaching & Learning Inquiry and examines instructors' emotional responses when they give students assessment feedback.

Episode Notes

See our extended show notes at https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/instructors-emotions-associated-with-dialogic-feed-forward/

This week’s episode features an open-access article from Teaching & Learning Inquiry and examines instructors' emotional responses when they give students assessment feedback:

Hill, Jennifer, Kathy Berlin, Julia Choate, Lisa Cravens-Brown, Lisa McKendrick-Calder, and Susan Smith. 2023. “Emotions Experienced by Instructors Delivering Written Feedback and Dialogic Feed-Forward." Teaching and Learning Inquiry 11. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.11.6

The episode was hosted by Jessie L. Moore, Director of the Center for Engaged Learning and Professor of Professional Writing & Rhetoric. 60-Second SoTL is produced by the Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University.

Episode Transcription

60-Second SoTL

Episode 19 – Instructors’ Emotions Associated with Dialogic Feed-Forward

(Piano Music)

00:03

Jessie L. Moore:

What emotions do instructors experience when giving feedback? That’s the focus of this week’s 60-second SoTL from Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning. I’m Jessie Moore.

00:12

(Piano Music)

00:15

In “Emotions Experienced by Instructors Delivering Written Feedback and Dialogic Feed-Forward,” published in the open access journal, Teaching & Learning Inquiry, Jennifer Hill, Kathy Berlin, Julia Choate, Lisa Cravens-Brown, Lisa McKendrick-Calder, and Susan Smith explore instructors’ emotional responses when they give assessment feedback.

00:34

The research team reports on semi-structured interviews conducted with three members of their team who had engaged with dialogic feed-forward in their teaching. Dialogic feed-forward is the practice of delivering feedback during a face-to-face conversation with the learner, and the term feed-forward signals a focus on feedback that explicitly informs revisions of the same assignment or work on a future assignment. Dialogic feed-forward meetings often include co-constructed plans for how the student will act on the feedback.

01:03

This study focuses on three instructors who used dialogic feed-forward in a year 1 health sciences unit at a U.S. institution, a year 2 geography unit at a U.K. institution, and a year 4 nursing unit at a Canadian institution.

The interviews were conducted by a single team member who had not implemented a dialogic intervention, and the interview transcripts were analyzed inductively using thematic analysis by three of the team’s non-intervention researchers.

01:31

The researchers share 5 main themes from the interview data:

First, instructors noted negative emotions associated with their use of summative written feedback because the instructors felt distanced from their students, not knowing how the students would respond to or act on the feedback.
Second, dialogic feed-forward prompted a range of emotions for instructors as they anticipated students’ own emotional responses to feedback. Nervous energy dissipated as instructors become more comfortable with the dialogic feed-forward process, and the participants noted that the dialogic meetings enabled them to work through students’ emotional responses with the learners during the feed-forward conversations.
Third, dialogic feed-forward was emotionally challenging for instructors, since meetings directly addressed students’ reactions to feedback. Instructors sometimes masked their own emotions to minimize their impact on the students.
Fourth, dialogic feed-forward fostered relationships and students’ sense of belonging.
Fifth, dialogic feed-forward was transformational for instructors, informing other parts of their teaching and assessment.

02:34

While optimistic about the impact of dialogic feed-forward, the research team notes that it’s time-intensive, so they encourage readers to consider how it might be embedded early in a curriculum to foster a feedback culture and to develop feedback literacies.

Finally, in addition to studying the outcomes of dialogic feed-forward, the research team provides a helpful synthesis of other recent scholarship on feedback.

02:56

To learn more about this study, follow the link in our show notes to read the open access article and to review our supplemental resources for this episode.

03:03

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03:06

Join us next week for another snapshot of recent scholarship of teaching and learning on 60-second SoTL from Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning. Learn more about the Center at www.CenterForEngagedLearning.org.

03:19

(Piano Music)