The power of feedback in professional learning

• Main Author: Bodman, Susan
• Published: University College London (University of London) 2007
• Subjects: 370.711
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.535728

This longitudinal study explores the power and potential of feedback for expert professional learners. Feedback designed for professional learners has complex goals, including higher cognition, greater independence, increased perception within the field of activity and increased levels of reflection, both on and in action. Feedback definitions, which focus on improvement of product outcome, need to reflect the constructivist nature of giving and receiving information about learning. Feedback, as linked to assessment and evaluation practices, has roles for both teacher and learner. if feedback is to be optimally effective, its interaction with learner, learning environment, curriculum and teacher need to become understood through experience by learners in that context. The context of this study is a fulltime Master's programme for teacher educators at the Institute of Education, University of London. The findings, using data from interviews, course documents, field notes and written examples of feedback, demonstrate that feedback as a concept is somewhat uniquely constructed. This construction has the potential to either assist, or impede, or leave undisturbed the learning intentions of the feedback being understood and acted upon by the learner. Feedback can assist the process of perspective transformation. As learners learn, they are transformed, if feedback acts as catalyst to learning for knowledge construction, learning about the construction process itself and associated values in a given context. Therefore, feedback when perceived as a curriculum within a curriculum can provide a powerful means by which the goal of transformation is achieved. Feedback, as a socially situated practice, can operate as catalyst, process, product and curriculum when adopted in higher professional learning. The learning process, as knowledge and action, moves from the interpersonal to the intra-personal, with the feedback curriculum acting to enhance self assessment and self-directed learning, as learners actively seek and interpret feedback from the learning contexts which they lead.