28 Providing Feedback
As you compile and share your feedback, remember that those who seek review are often vulnerable and anxious, so ensure that your feedback is constructive, fair, and practical. This will help build trust and set the reviewee more at ease. Below, the Principles of Effective Feedback, informed by a University of Illinois Chicago Peer Feedback on your Teaching resource (Tse, 2022), can help ensure that you meet these needs.
- Prioritize comments that will provide the most help to the educator and address the biggest issues with the teaching portfolio, provided they are actionable. When you review a portfolio, it can be common to find a couple of areas for improvement that are generally applicable throughout the entire portfolio. It may be prudent to prioritize addressing these first when sharing your feedback with the educator.
- Provide specific feedback. Giving feedback with concrete examples or suggestions will help the educator be able to understand and action that feedback. Feedback that is more general may be confusing, misinterpreted and difficult to implement in a practical way.
- Be descriptive rather than evaluative. Avoid making judgements, and focus the feedback on what the educator has put down in their portfolio (for example, noting that the teaching philosophy statement included only a couple of basic examples of practice that left you wanting more), not what you assume (for example, suggesting that as they get more experience, they will be able to add variety and further nuance to their examples).
- Give a balanced review. Remember to point out what you appreciate about the teaching portfolio, so that the educator knows what to keep as they refine their final draft.
- Keep it manageable. Above, prioritization is suggested, which will help keep things manageable. If you suspect that the volume of feedback may be too much, prioritize and then cut some of the least significant issues at the bottom of your priority list. It is okay to let some things go.
Together, these guiding questions, frameworks, forms of evidence, and tips on providing feedback should help you determine an approach that works for you and the educator whose portfolio you are reviewing – and ideally, one that you may be able to implement consistently over time.