Exploring initial teacher trainees’ feedback orientation

About this research

Teacher educators are interested in ways to support teachers – particularly novices – to continue to improve. In this research we examined whether novice teachers' feedback orientation (how much they value and accept feedback) could help us to understand why some novice teachers improve more than others. People who are higher in feedback orientation generally perform better in the workplace. It is also believed that feedback orientation can change and develop over time as people experience cycles of feedback in the workplace.

We thought that feedback orientation could be important for teacher educators for several reasons. Understanding why some teachers respond to feedback better than others may help coaches or mentors to use feedback more effectively. If feedback orientation predicts improvement in teaching quality, teacher educators may want to measure it, or they might consider ways to develop it in novice teachers to help them improve. Teacher educators may also be interested in feedback orientation as a recruitment tool, if teachers who have higher feedback orientation do appear to improve more in practice.

Findings

Our study found that:

• Feedback orientation might improve over time as individuals train to be teachers.
• Feedback orientation did not reliably predict how much novice teachers improved.
• There may be a link between teachers’ feedback environment during their school placements, and their feedback orientation.

Read the research

Read a summary of our findings for educators: download summary paper PDF

Read the findings in full: download full paper PDF

Cite this paper

Banks, B., Curran, J., Meliss, S., Sims, S., Chowdhury, N., Altunbas, H. G., Alexandri, N., MacTavish, L., & Instone, I. (2024). Why do some teachers improve more than others? Exploring initial teacher trainees’ feedback orientation. Ambition Institute.