Case Study Institutional Broker of Feedback

This case study has been developed from observations of the teaching component; data from a university wide survey on how feedback is used by students; interviews with colleagues and the Students ’ Union; and a tutor interview Background This case study brings together the vision and persuasive abilities of one biology tutor’s journey with students engaging with feedback. The tutor has made use of his quiet authority and vast expertise with the student experience and the topic of feedback to become a leader in his School of Biological Sciences (SBS). The approaches used from SBS to improve his students ’ engagement with feedback were then put into practice incrementally in other schools across the University to ultimately bring about institutional change. In 2006, National Student Survey (NSS) and internal survey results for SBS were reasons for the tutor to begin this journey. As the student experience is at the heart of everything for him (and not in a superficial way) his approach was to bring about long lasting and far reaching improvements to the student learning experience which were informed by his attendance at a Centre workshop on feedback. His approach involved targeting a problem worth attempting to solve, identifying different approaches, carefully articulating its merit to bring about a positive change, and campaigning the importance of the work in order to enlist others first within hi