Navigating Negative Course Feedback
Feedback is a fundamental aspect of teaching as it offers valuable insights into students’ perspectives. However, the journey of navigating feedback, especially when it’s negative, can be emotionally taxing and challenging. Often, feedback is available for teachers to read right before holiday periods, which can feel extra overwhelming. How to deal with negative feedback that tends to weigh heavily on the mind?
Every teacher sometimes receives negative course feedback from students. It is common that feedback given anonymously can at times feel very critical in tone. While feedback can, at best, refine our teaching and help us get a read on our students, it is understandable that negative feedback, in particular, can evoke a wide range of thoughts and feelings. Please don’t deal with these alone.
- You can get support for processing feedback from your school’s Learning Services. Don’t hesitate to contact, for example, your school’s pedagogical specialist, programme planner, or the course feedback contact person, who can coach you in going through the feedback and help you make use of it.
- Your colleagues can be a crucial support in processing feedback. You will most likely notice that other teachers have similar challenges as you do. An open feedback culture is fostered by discussing feedback within the teaching community and finding out solutions together.
- If you need support in processing the emotions the feedback raises, you can book a coaching session to support your workplace well-being and, if necessary, also contact occupational health services.
Keep in mind that negative feedback does not indicate failure. Course feedback is about the course, not about you as a teacher. Negative feedback can serve as an important tool for reflection and course development, especially if many students make similar observations. However, as there can be various reasons behind negative feedback, it’s important to look at the feedback as a whole. Pedagogically justified decisions don’t always make everyone happy, as learning itself isn’t always easy. It’s also good to take a look at how many students provided feedback on the same issue. Sometimes one person might like something that another person didn’t like at all and that’s not necessarily a reason to change the course. In this regard, it’s beneficial to talk about the feedback with the students. It’s advisable to inform the students about how the feedback will be acted upon: what will be changed and what will remain the same, along with the reasons why. Also, the next cohort of students should be informed of the previous feedback and its utilization so that they can see that their feedback will matter too.
Remember, that inappropriate feedback is a completely different matter and, according to the Aalto University Code of Conduct, should always be reported forward to your supervisor.
This blog post is part of Teacher Services’ ongoing series Feedback culture tips. At Aalto University, course feedback holds a distinctive place within our feedback portfolio, reaching students at every stage of their studies. We firmly believe in the importance of amplifying students’ voices, considering it a fundamental aspect of teaching and education development. Consequently, course feedback is seamlessly integrated into our educational landscape, constituting a consistent element from the course’s inception, throughout its duration, and up to its conclusion. Read more: Course feedback in Aalto University | Aalto University.
