The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Written Feedback in Student Teams

Group work is almost ubiquitous in business courses, and yet many instructors fail to address the inherent challenges students encounter when working with groups of peers. This often leads to negative student experiences and missed developmental opportunities. The use of peer surveys provides a particularly perilous moment: students often don’t have the tools necessary to give and receive constructive feedback. We designed a feedback activity based on a short in class exercise, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Written Feedback, to create a platform to discuss issues encountered in student teams as well as providing a low-risk environment in which students can discuss how to provide written feedback on these issues to their peers. Our session briefly discusses the perils of student peer surveys in class rooms today, and then uses the short exercise with periodic “teaching time outs” to show how these surveys can be used to teach feedback skills and improve the student experience.