Providing feedback at Input 2

Tips on providing feedback to your peers.

As part of judging other students’ submission pieces of work halfway through the Edinburgh Award, you will be required to give feedback on each piece you see. Don’t worry, this is not expected to be a time-consuming task, you just need to provide feedback that will be useful to the person who wrote the submission.

Some points to bear in mind:

• Refer to each learning objective in your feedback;
• Try to leave both positive and constructive feedback; 
• Balance general comments (if they have reflected well across the entire submission or something in general was lacking) and specific remarks  (if there was something particularly good about it that stood out to you or if there was something you felt was missing or weak in one part of the submission); and
• Don’t worry too much if you aren’t able to comment on everything you would like to - each reflection will be reviewed by a number of people so others are likely to pick up anything you don’t mention.

Guidelines

Be Specific

Ensure your feedback is useful. Simply saying that something was "good" or "bad" does not give your peer any understanding of why this was the case. You should try to be more specific than this - what about the reflections did you think was good and what could have been better? Try to imagine what you would find helpful if this feedback was being given to you.

Stay Focused

Remember the learning objectives you are looking for in these reflections:

• Have they described what they have learned from analysing or thinking critically and reflectively about their experiences?
• Have they taken specific steps to try to improve their chosen skills and their impact?
• Have they sought opportunities to improve, rather than simply waiting for opportunities to come to them?

With this in mind, spelling and grammar should not be heavily considered, unless the text is difficult to understand as a result.

Learning Objectives

Feedback examples

Positive feedback

“These reflections were good to read because you have clearly described all of the active steps taken to try to improve all of your skills.”

• This is helpful feedback because it refers specifically to one aspect of a student’s reflections - this student has obviously described "specific steps to try to improve their chosen skills" and the reviewer has picked up on this.

Constructive feedback

“It would have been better if you had included examples of ways that you have tried to improve and develop your skills rather than just describing times when you have used the skills.”

• This is constructive because, rather than simply noticing that one of the Learning Objectives is missing from these reflections, the judge has highlighted exactly how the reflections could be improved to meet the requirements.