Giving and Receiving Feedback

Team Retrospectives

Building in reflective pauses for individuals and teams is an important part of experiential learning (please see Reflection for Experiential Learning for more information). For the team, there should be a “retrospective” component of their work planning meetings. In other words, when the team gets together to plan the next phase of work, the team first reflects on the following questions and someone takes notes and recommendations for changes. The team should be encouraged to think of this as an opportunity to try something new for the next phase of work; if this new approach doesn’t work, it can be edited at the next retrospective. The Scrum Methodology provides a good explanation of this team reflection in What is a Sprint Retrospective.

1. What went well?
   • Identifies successes and positive experiences to reinforce effective practices.
2. What didn’t go well?
   • Highlights challenges, obstacles, or areas of struggle to address.
3. What have we learned?
   • Encourages reflection on new insights, understanding, and growth opportunities.
4. What still puzzles us?
   • Opens the floor for unresolved questions or confusion that may need further discussion or external input.
5. What should we start doing?
   • Looks for new ideas, practices, or tools that the team isn’t currently using but could benefit from.
6. What should we stop doing?
   • Identifies activities, processes, or behaviors that are not adding value or negatively impacting the team.
7. What should we continue doing?
   • Acknowledges and reinforces effective practices and successful strategies that should be maintained.

Many others can be added but a focus on keeping the meeting brief and without blame are extremely important.

Individual Reflections

To provide students with the opportunity to reflect on their learning and to help them stay accountable to other team members, they can be asked to submit essay reflections on their experience with the project. The first reflection can be in the first half of the project as part of the “Discovery Phase” and the second reflection comes at the end of the project, with a focus on the “Implementation Phase”. An example of the Discovery Reflection is provided below (currently available only for Boston University instructors) . Instructors will likely need to customize this based on their class and projects.

Discovery Phase Reflection Example

Peer Feedback

One of the challenges with ensuring teams are productive and positive is encouraging all team members to contribute to the best of their abilities. This challenge is multi-dimensional.

First, the team members may not all be able to contribute equally because of time, skills, etc. However, this should still be regarded as “sufficient” for the team. The team should be taught to respect the amount of contribution each team member is capable of.

Next, not all the team members will respect the contributions of all other team members. This may be observed, for example, in software teams where developers may not respect the contributions of documentation writers or user experience designers or vice versa. Instructors are encouraged to discuss the way all skills are essential for the project to be successfully implemented and to build a community understanding of how all team members’ contributions are important and even required.

Finally, students may need assistance in learning how to provide useful feedback to each other. The ability for team members to provide effective feedback on performance is an essential skill to build, and has a direct impact on team effectiveness and success. Effective feedback aligns people. It leads to increased trust, commitment, and motivation. The goal of feedback is to help the team function and perform better.

The Team Learning Assistant (TLA) approach will strengthen students’ skills in providing helpful feedback to each other.

Two rounds of peer feedback, one during the middle of the project and one at the end, will support the team understanding of all contributions. Before the project starts the teams should be made aware of these feedback opportunities. Some instructors choose to have peer feedback impact the individual grade of team members; for example, if the team is given a project grade of an A but one student was poorly reviewed by their peers, they may receive an A-.  Typically, the impact of negative reviews is much greater than the impact of positive reviews.

Useful Resources

• Example of Peer Feedback Form (for copying purposes only)
• Addressing Meeting Preparation
• Tips for TLA: Performance Feedback