Feedback literacy in the ITTECF

Project overview

Feedback is an essential catalyst of teachers’ professional development. Trainee and early-career teachers receive feedback regularly, including through mentoring and classroom observations; however, it is far from straightforward for people to learn effectively from feedback, and doing so can require advanced ‘feedback literacy’ (i.e. “the understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies” (Carless & Boud, 2018). In a recent survey of over 9000 teachers in England, we found a strong consensus on the need to better nurture trainee teachers’ feedback literacy.

We might reasonably expect that mentors’ own feedback skills and mentoring approaches would play a crucial role in shaping the skills of trainees and ECTs. Yet the research literature currently offers us relatively little insight into the role of mentors in nurturing mentees’ feedback literacy, nor about the extent to which these feedback skills contribute in turn to mentees’ broader professional development. At the NIoT we are therefore conducting research with the following aims:

• To measure feedback literacy among trainee teachers, ECTs, and their mentors, and to track changes in trainees’ and ECTs’ feedback literacy over time.
• To assess how mentors’ feedback literacy and mentoring style shape the development of their mentees’ feedback literacy over time, and other positive outcomes such as their teaching self-efficacy.

Project Team

• Dr. Rob Nash, Head of Psychological Research, NIoT
• Dr. Bronte Mckeown, Research Fellow, NIoT
• Emily Beach, Head of ITE Faculty, NIoT
• Katy Micklewright, Head of ECF Faculty, NIoT
• Yamini Almal, Research Assistant, NIoT

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