'The difficulty and discomfort associated with receiving feedback is a shared human experience'

How did you move from studying memory to looking into feedback?

In my first lecturing job, I had the opportunity to collaborate with my colleague Naomi Winstone. We had this mutual frustration that we were doing lots of things to improve our NSS [National Student Survey] scores, and a particular area of low satisfaction was with feedback. We were trying to improve our feedback practice, but none of it was really paying off. Quite often, we found we'd provide feedback, but students wouldn't collect it, and this felt like a big problem.

Naomi came to me and suggested we apply for a small HEA grant, and that was my first foray into educational research. The grant was designed to look at how we might better support students to engage with the feedback they receive. It was supposed to last for around 15 months, but we're both still working on this topic over a decade later!

Can you tell me what you've found about feedback and how students can better engage with it?

We all want to be the best at what we do, we all want to achieve and do well. But when someone comes along and says, 'Here's some information or advice on how you can do even better, ' we often say, 'No, thank you!' We've done research on the barriers people experience that stop them from being able to engage well with feedback. It might be that they struggle to understand it, or don't have the strategies to turn feedback into action, or so forth.

The thing that dawned on me quite quickly when we were first doing this work was that this is not a student problem – we all tend to hate receiving feedback, we all find it a difficult experience, so why do we expect our students to feel differently? As psychologists, we're really well equipped to understand these issues theoretically and pedagogically as well.

How can we make receiving feedback more acceptable or useful?

I think we need to move away from thinking about this as something that can be solved by just giving a different kind of feedback, or timing it differently, or giving more. Yes, the information that you give is important, and how you give it is important, but the issue of people not engaging with it or using it effectively can't be resolved by simply doing a better job of giving feedback – we have to think about how the person is receiving it.

We know that very few students come to university having ever really had a conversation about how to engage well with feedback. It's clear that receiving and acting on feedback are difficult skills, and we recognise people haven't been taught these skills, but we still expect they should be intuitively good at it. I think some of it is around reframing it and accepting that we do need to teach this skill explicitly to students, we need to spend time on teaching it, rather than spending our time on just giving more and more feedback that doesn't land at all.

What would an 'engaging with feedback' lesson look like?

I've run these kinds of lessons many times, and a good place to start is humanising the struggle! Making students recognise that the difficulty and discomfort associated with receiving feedback is a shared human experience. It's so easy to think, 'I hate receiving feedback, that must mean I'm a bad student'. So it can be useful to tell them how you, as their lecturer, reacted when you just got reviews back on a paper, and now you really hate reviewer two!

As well as humanising the discomfort, it is also useful to have a conversation about barriers and what makes engaging with feedback difficult. This is a particularly useful conversation to have with psychology students because you can help them to think about the actual psychology behind it.

You can then also have conversations about solutions – what are the practical things you can do to get around those knee-jerk reactions, or understanding what to do with the comments you receive. It's about providing practical advice and framing engagement with feedback as something that's worthy of students' time and not necessarily difficult.

Can you tell me about your work at the National Institute of Teaching (NIoT)?

The National Institute of Teaching is a pretty new organisation, we're only about three years old, and we aim to improve the quality of training and professional development for school teachers and leaders, especially in low-resourced communities. Our goal is to be research-informed, so we do a lot of primary research and evidence synthesis to underpin what we do and to share with the sector. I see my role as to ensure we are tackling psychological research questions, to understand how what we do changes how teachers think and behave, and how that drives their professional development.

One of the biggest differences I've noticed about doing research at the NIoT compared with doing research in mainstream academia is that in academic research, we often focus on our papers and outputs, and then afterwards, we focus on how they might have a real-world impact. Working in an organisation like NIoT, it's very much the opposite – we're driven from the beginning by the impact we want to have, and so every stage of the research process involves much closer collaboration with stakeholders.

As a team at NIoT, we've been thinking a lot about diversity – minority groups are under-represented among teachers, but not usually underrepresented among applicants for teacher training. We're thinking about how research can help us to address the issue of why certain groups of applicants might fall out of the training and development pipeline. I'm really enjoying getting my teeth into those kinds of questions around how we support the teaching sector and how we become more inclusive and diverse.