Toolbox of Accessible Pedagogical Teaching Practices

GIVING AND RECEIVING FEEDBACK

We are continually receiving and giving feedback, both explicitly through oral and written language, and implicitly through gestures and tone of voice. It is important to distinguish feedback from evaluation. Feedback is a formative assessment tool that provides information regarding learning in the learning environment using descriptive, constructive, and nonjudgmental language. Evaluation is a summative assessment tool that judges learning and allows for comparison against a standard of learning.

Giving Effective Feedback:

  • Prioritize your ideas. Limit your feedback to the most important issues. Consider the feedback’s potential value to the receiver and how you would respond – could you act on the feedback? Additionally, too much feedback provided at a single time can be overwhelming to the recipient.

  • Balance the content. It is important to provide the recipient with balanced feedback regarding their strengths and their opportunities for growth. Providing feedback on strengths acts to identify and reinforce the learning, skills, and behaviors that the recipient should continue engaging in. Providing feedback on opportunities for growth and improvement with actionable and tangible methods of implementation enables the recipient to make necessary changes. 

  • Be specific. Avoid general comments that may be of limited use to the receiver. Try to include examples to illustrate your statement. As well, offering alternatives rather than just giving advice allows the receiver to decide what to do with your feedback.

  • Be realistic. Feedback should focus on what can be changed. It is useless and frustrating for recipients to get comments on something over which they have no control. Also, remember to avoid using the words “always” and “never.” People’s behavior is rarely that consistent.

  • Own the feedback. When offering evaluative comments, use the pronoun “I” rather than “they” or “one,” which would imply that your opinion is universally agreed on. Remember that feedback is merely your opinion.

  • Be timely. Seek an appropriate time to communicate your feedback. Being prompt is key since feedback loses its impact if delayed too long. Delayed feedback can also cause feelings of guilt and resentment in the recipient if the opportunity for improvement has passed. As well, if your feedback is primarily negative, take time to prepare what you will say or write.

  • Offer continuing support. Feedback should be a continuous process, not a one-time event. After offering feedback, make a conscious effort to follow up. Let recipients know you are available if they have questions, and, if appropriate, ask for another opportunity to provide more feedback in the future.

Receiving Effective Feedback:

  • Listen to the feedback given. This means not interrupting. Hear the person out, and listen to what they are really saying, not what you assume they will say. You can absorb more information if you are concentrating on listening and understanding rather than being defensive and focusing on your response.

  • Be aware of your responses. Your body language and tone of voice often speak louder than words. Try to avoid putting up barriers. If you look distracted and bored, that sends a negative message as well. Attentiveness, on the other hand, indicates that you value what someone has to say and puts both of you at ease.

  • Be open. This means being receptive to new ideas and different opinions. Often, there is more than one way of doing something and others may have a completely different viewpoint on a given topic. You may learn something worthwhile.

  • Understand the message. Make sure you understand what is being said to you, especially before responding to the feedback. Ask questions for clarification if necessary. Listen actively by repeating key points so that you know you have interpreted the feedback correctly. In a group environment, ask for others’ feedback before responding. As well, when possible, be explicit as to what kind of feedback you are seeking beforehand so you are not taken by surprise.

  • Reflect and decide what to do. Assess the value of the feedback, the consequences of using it or ignoring it, and then decide what to do because of it. Your response is your choice. If you disagree with the feedback, consider asking for a second opinion from someone else.

  • Follow up. There are many ways to follow up on feedback. Sometimes, your follow-up will simply involve implementing the suggestions given to you. In other situations, you might want to set up another meeting to discuss the feedback or to re-submit the revised work.


resources

The following resources provide some useful perspectives on conflict resolution processes:

Mental Health Support: As students affiliated with LJMU you have access to support services for health and wellbeing. More information can be found here about booking counseling services, joining mindfulness practice groups and mental health support in multiple forms.

The following resources may also be of relevance to the consideration and discussion of AID issues:

Aorta Collective is an anti-oppression resource and training alliance that works for infrastructural change through critical facilitation models. Based in the United States, these facilitation models supports facilitators in creating less harmful collective spaces for all.

Dismantling Racism Workbook Through a series of headings—Assumptions, History, Racism Defined, Internalizations, White Supremacy Culture, Analysis Tools, Action Tools, Resources, and About dRWORKS—this workbook moves through frameworks that unmake cis-hetero white non-disabled patriarchy as the norm. Moving from a Critical Race Theory framework, the workbook takes readers through white supremacy culture towards noticing the ways it reproduces itself in small and large scale organizations and groups so that we can begin to unmake it.

BIPOC, Disability, Gender Nonconforming & Queer Empowerment

Access Intimacy: The Missing Link by Mia Mingus. Access Intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs.  The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level.

Disability Visibility Project is an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture.

Power Not Pity is a podcast for disabled people of color everywhere. This podcast explores the worlds of people in our community who dare to interrogate the dominant narrative of what survival feels like for a disabled person of color during these trying times. They all demonstrate what it means to thrive fully and authentically.

Society of Disabled Oracles. Described as “a living chorus and archive of disabled wisdom from the past, present and future,” Society of Disabled Oracles is a project featuring 'telegrams' by disabled oracles to the world in the form of text, video, audio, and graphic art.

Possibilities Podcast engages in deep dive conversations with queer and trans black, indigenous people of color artists and possibility makers to understand what makes bold creations tick and seemingly impossible dreams tangible.

anti-oppressive pedagogies & frameworks

6 Guiding Principles To A Trauma-Informed Approach, CDC and SAMHSA’s National Center for Trauma-Informed Care.

Accessible Teaching in the Time of Covid-19 and for any online teaching, ongoing from the Critical Design Lab and Aimi Hamraie.

Collective Conditions, a work session from the Feminist Brussels-Based Technology Collective, Constant.
This series of programs looked at the role of collective agreements in community based work between online communities and activist organizations – all of whom set intentional guidelines for how we could be together in space.

DARCI Collective Decision Making Model, a tool for establishing clear accountability in teams and organizations, or in group projects. This model comes out of the book of tools “Tools for Transformation” which include multiple practices for groups and individuals to center value driven work in groups of all scales.

Ableism/Language, Lydia X.Z. Brown.
As Brown writes in this blog post on ableist language: Ableism is not a list of bad words. Language is *one* tool of an oppressive system. Being aware of language—for those of us who have the privilege of being able to change our language—can help us understand how pervasive ableism is. Ableism is systematic, institutional devaluing of bodies and minds deemed deviant, abnormal, defective, subhuman, less than. Ableism is *violence.*

Disability Justice Event Planning, SINS INVALID.
In this document SINS INVALID, a Disability Justice performance collective based in California, U.S., shares a list of suggestions for how to make your event, performance, meeting and/or exhibition more accessible for disabled people.

Diskrit-Kubi (Discrimination Critical Perspectives at the Interface between Education and Art) (in German).
A toolkit designed to prepare students and teachers to facilitate and unlearn together to understand our own intersectional identities and power differences. These pedagogical art-classroom tools are critical of power structures and support us in integrating social justice into our living, making, teaching and learning. 

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks
Published in 1994, Teaching to Transgress remains a foundational text that writes about education as the practice of freedom. In this book hooks discusses how to ‘transgress’ against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, which is for hooks, the teacher's most important goal. bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom?

Trauma Informed Principles & Practices
This video offers an introduction to trauma-informed principles and why they are important for all organizations. The difference between "trauma-informed" and "trauma-focused" is outlined while commenting on trends in the mental health treatment field. Leaders, supervisors, professionals, students, and others interested in learning about trauma will find this video helpful. 

Projects Coordinator