Feedback people can act on

The idea in one sentence: good feedback answers three questions: where am I going, how am I doing, and what should I do next? The last one, the “feedforward”, is what turns feedback into something people can act on.

You’ve seen this already

Think of a sat nav. It knows where you’re going. It knows where you are. And it tells you exactly what to do next: “In 200 yards, turn left.”

Now imagine a sat nav that only said “Good driving!” or “You’re going the wrong way.” The first feels nice and tells you nothing. The second is true, but you’re still lost. What helps is the next turn.

Why it matters for your teaching

Much of the feedback in healthcare sounds like the second sat nav. “Great job today.” “You need to be more organised.” “Work on your communication.” They’re kindly meant, but nobody can act on them.

Take a student paramedic who has just handed over a patient at the emergency department. Compare:

	Hard to use	Easy to use
Where am I going?	(never said)	“A handover the nurse can act on in under a minute”
How am I doing?	”Good, but a bit long"	"You gave the obs clearly. The history came before the main problem, so the nurse was waiting”
What next?	”Work on structure"	"Next time, lead with the main problem in one sentence, then the obs”

Only the right-hand column gives them something to try on the next job. That’s the point of feedback: not to grade what happened, but to help someone do something differently next time.

Try this

• Name the goal first. If people don’t know what good looks like, feedback has nothing to measure against.
• Talk about the task, not the person. “That history didn’t include who’s at home” is useful. “You’re not very thorough” is a judgement about them. Praise aimed at the person (“you’re a natural”) feels nice but carries little to learn from.
• Ask before you tell. “How did you think that went?” shows you what they already noticed, so you can confirm it rather than repeat it. Expect some people to judge themselves too harshly, and some too kindly.
• End with one specific next step. Not “be more systematic”, but “next time, check the drug chart before you draw up”. One thing they can try, and where.

How sure are we?

Feedback is one of the most studied topics in education. Large reviews, mostly from schools and universities, find that feedback on average helps learning a lot. But the effect varies hugely. One major review found that in about a third of the results it pooled, feedback made performance worse, often when it pointed attention at the person rather than the task.

So “give more feedback” isn’t the lesson. The kind of feedback matters. Feedback about the task and how to approach it tends to help most; praise of the person tends to help least.

Most of this evidence comes from classrooms, not workplaces. Healthcare models such as R2C2 (below) build on it, but they are newer and less tested. The word “feedforward” is also used in coaching, where it sometimes means skipping the past and only talking about the future. That’s not the idea here: the three questions work best together.

Where it comes from

John Hattie and Helen Timperley, education researchers in New Zealand, set out the three questions in 2007, drawing on many earlier reviews. Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi (1996) showed that feedback can backfire. Joan Sargeant and colleagues (2015) developed R2C2, drawing on research on self-assessment and behaviour change. It is a model for feedback conversations in practice: build the relationship, explore their reactions, discuss the content, then coach towards change.