We’re pleased to offer two pre-conference workshops on Sunday, June 25th, 2:00-5:00 PM. Registered attendees may participate in either of the workshops at no additional cost.

Feedback Literacy in Higher Education: Enhancing Learning, Building Relationships, and Fostering Inclusivity

Facilitated by Breana Bayraktar (George Mason University), Katherine Troyer (Trinity University), and Kiruthika Ragupathi (National University of Singapore)

Effective feedback has an important role in student learning. For students to benefit from feedback provided, they have to know how to make the most of the feedback they receive. This is feedback literacy, or having “the understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies” (Carless & Boud, 2018, p. 1316). Both students and instructors must become feedback literate (Nieminen & Carless, 2022; Xu & Carless 2017), using feedback not only to improve performance on a specific task but also to apply what is learned to future tasks.

This pre-conference workshop will start by exploring feedback literacy through a pre-assessment and an opening activity where participants share one thing they know or believe about feedback literacy, one question they have, and a challenge that they have faced with developing feedback literacy in their students. This discussion will ground the workshop in what attendees do as instructors when providing feedback, and in their perceptions of how students use feedback. To provide further context for the activities and discussions to come, we will share with participants the results from our recent study that explored feedback beliefs and practices among higher education faculty. In particular, we will share findings regarding (1) feedback as a mechanism for relationship-building, (2) student ownership of the feedback process, and (3) feedback as an inclusive practice.

The second section of the workshop explore three themes/guiding questions through three rounds of small- and large-group discussions and activities:
(1) Building relationships: How do you use feedback to build instructor-student and student-student relationships?
(2) Student ownership: What are the key elements of student ownership when it comes to feedback?
(3) Inclusive feedback: What are some inclusive teaching strategies that we can incorporate into our feedback practices?

In each round, small groups will be provided with vignettes designed to elicit discussion around each of the three themes. Groups will work to explore and respond to the vignettes, and then share their key insights and takeaways with the larger group. As each group shares their ideas, we will use a whiteboard to capture and organize the ideas so that participants can build on the ideas shared as they consider how to design a feedback cycle for their context.

In the final hour, participants will build on the small-group work to integrate the concepts and ideas into their own feedback plan for a course they teach or a major assignment they assign. Participants will draft plans for implementing a feedback cycle that (1) provides students with appropriate and useful feedback, (2) deliberately builds classroom relationships to contribute to a more inclusive class environment, and (3) seeks evidence of student learning to inform the feedback cycle. As they share their plans with their partner or small group, they will focus on providing the larger group with specific, actionable goals for implementing their feedback plans. The session will wrap up with a brief summary of the key insights and takeaways.

Centering Inclusion and Equity: Workshopping a Rubric for Instructional Design

Facilitated by Joe Bandy (Vanderbilt University), Patti H. Clayton (UNC Greensboro), Sarah E. Stanlick (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), and Meredyth Wegener (Vanderbilt University)

Higher education is experiencing a transformation born, in part, of the increasing diversity of our institutions, inequities and injustices in our broader society, and growing interests among educators for ways to live into values of social justice. In this context there is a rapidly growing literature across the disciplines on inclusive and equitable teaching practices that is, at times, overwhelming for practitioners and educational developers alike. Therefore, faculty, students, staff, and community members who are part of designing, reflecting on, and revising courses can benefit from a tool that distills principles of promising practice in this arena.

Session facilitators have developed – through two rounds of extensive peer feedback from folks of different institutional, role, and personal identities – an accessible, user-friendly rubric that synthesizes and operationalizes many of these promising practices. The rubric is grounded in the conviction that inclusive instructional design is co-created by ever more stakeholders (e.g., students, community members). Rubric domains include Instructor Learning, Values and Core Commitments, Learning Goals, Learning Experiences and Interaction, and Learning Assessment. Domains each have between four and six dimensions, including, for example, Reflection on my own biases and Orientation toward expertise and learning (under the domain of Instructor Learning), Personalization and Transparency (under Values and Core Commitments), Knowledge goals and Skills goals (under Learning Goals), Class norms and Communication (under Learning Experiences and Interactions), and Diversity of assignments and Scaffolding (under Learning Assessment). The rubric operationalizes each domain at five levels from Novice and Emergent through Deliberate and Integrated to Engaged with Educational Systems and Engaged with Community and Society, with the trajectory across them building toward critical engagement with the systems that limit possibilities of inclusion and equity.

Facilitators will introduce the rubric and summarize the contributions of key bodies of literature. Participants will all use two pre-selected dimensions of the rubric (one from Instructor Learning and one from Values and Core Commitments) in order to familiarize themselves with its nature and structure. After we debrief that experience together, participants will identify one of the five domains of particular interest to them and form small groups accordingly, working in groups to apply the corresponding rubric dimensions to their own contexts and to provide constructive critique to improve its content and accessibility. After a period of collaborative discussion, participants will rotate to a second domain-based small group and repeat the process. Having applied and evaluated two domains of the rubric from the user’s perspective, participants will come together as a whole group to co-generate and explore potential areas of inquiry that can be examined using the rubric. They will leave the session with the current version of the rubric that they can adapt for their own uses and a set of related research questions and strategies.