Acting on feedback
In this post, you will reflect on how to prioritise your feedback to create a personalised action plan.
Contents
Introduction
The final stage in making the most of your feedback is setting a plan of action for yourself.
To create a plan of action, you need to actively engage with your feedback and decide what to do with your feedback. All types of feedback you receive can be fed forward to your next assignment or piece of work.
In this section, we will take you through the main steps of prioritising and actioning your feedback.
The main steps of prioritising and actioning your feedback:
- Identify areas for further development
- Prioritise which areas are most important for your next assignment
- Create an action plan to help you develop those aspects of your work
💭 Reflect
How do you currently prioritise actions from your feedback?
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You may not always be able to fully address every issue raised in your feedback in time for your next assignment (this is perfectly fine!). Therefore, you should think about what you can do in the short, medium and long-term.
Categorising your priorities in this way will help you decide what actions you will need to take.
✅ Poll
Which of these tools could you use to help prioritise actions from your feedback? Please vote below, all responses are anonymous.
There are no right or wrong answers in the poll, and you may have other suggestions. You could use all of these tools to help decide what to prioritise from your feedback. They can each tell you what your tutors expect in future pieces of work.
🔍 Practice activity
Take a look at the latest piece of feedback you received on your work, and compare this to an upcoming assignment by looking at the assignment brief or marking criteria. What area of your work do you need to develop?
Prioritising your feedback
How academics prioritise feedback
Watch this video with advice from academic Harsha Parmar on how she prioritises her own feedback.
How students prioritise feedback
Watch the video below where student Simone shares tips on how they prioritise their own feedback actions.
How will you prioritise feedback?
💬 Contribute
What are your key take-away points from listening to these videos?
Add your thoughts to the box below. Responses from the same person are the same colour. All comments are anonymous.
💭 Reflect
What new strategies will you now use to prioritise actions from your feedback?
Add your thoughts in the box below. The text is saved automatically on this device and browser only. Nobody else can see what you type.
The Action Organiser
The interactive Action Organiser tool will help you create an action plan to work on your feedback.
After identifying what you need to prioritise from your feedback, it is important to take the time to carefully plan how you will take those priorities forward.
To help you do this, we have created an Action Organiser that you can use to identify and prioritise your next steps so that you can make best use of your feedback.
The Action Organiser will ask you the below questions:
- What feedback did you receive for this assignment?
- What did the marking criteria ask for?
- What did you do well?
- What do you need to improve?
- What targets will you set yourself?
- What actions will you take to achieve your targets?
- How will you know you have achieved your targets?
✍ Action Organiser
- Add your thoughts in the box below.
- Nobody else can see what you type.
- The text is saved automatically on this device and browser only.
- Use the arrows to move between sections, or ‘Show/hide all’ to view all sections on one page.
Other Ways you can use the Action Organiser
Do you have an upcoming meeting with your Academic Adviser?
This tool can help plan your discussion with your Adviser. Use your feedback to fill out this tool and ask your Adviser for suggestions on how you can work towards your goals.
Do you have upcoming reflective assignments or portfolios?
Keeping a record of your feedback and development by completing the Action Planner with each assignment or practice placement will give you a record of your own progress, which you can base your reflections on.
Progressing to a new academic year?
If you keep a record of your completed Action Organisers from all your assignments in one year, you can use these to plan your own development before starting the new academic year. When doing this, try to identify recurring comments or suggestions across all the individual pieces of feedback.
Summary
To get the most out of feedback, use the skills you have learnt and the Action Organiser tool in this post each time you receive some feedback. Building time into your own study to prioritise and act on your feedback can help you develop your academic skills from one assessment to the next.
The strategies and Action Organiser introduced here work with all types of feedback. Our ‘Different Types of Feedback’ post will help you become familiar with the many ways lecturers and tutors will give feedback on your work. The advice and techniques in ‘Understanding academic feedback’ will help you make more specific and clear action plans. You can read all of these posts in the further support section below.
