Participant-facing documents (BP4)

Email invite to my focus group ‘You and your connections’. Final version
Information Sheet
Consent form
Pre-session information
Focus group questions and QR codes
Worksheets
Tick list

Blog Post 4: Critical Friends – Have you got feedback for me?

Asking my critical friends, my course team, for feedback: “Have you feedback for me?”
Mikha’s feedback
Ella’s reply

For the purpose of not making isolated professional judgements, to increase the depth of my inquiry, and for my work to hold up to critical scrutiny, I sought feedback of my “critical colleagues” and my “validation group”, my PgCert tutorial group with Andrew (McNiff, 2020; p.22). My critical colleagues were Ella, Mikha and Sean-Henry. Ella is the leader of the course, Mikha and Sean-Henry my colleagues.

When developing my student invite draft, I reached out to my critical colleagues asking for their feedback. As a team, we are mindful of each other’s workloads, so I appreciated that Mikha was able to respond with constructive comments. She recommended adding more detail about the purpose of the session and the activities involved. On reflection, I realised that I had not fully explained the meaning of the topic, “You and your connections,” nor provided a concrete example of what students would be doing, namely discussing prompts. I revised the invite to address these omissions and ensured I expressed my thanks for her contribution.

Mikha also suggested including ethical considerations such as anonymity and voluntary participation. These elements were already covered in the information sheet and consent form linked beneath the image, which she had overlooked. This highlighted to me the importance of providing my critical friends with clear contextual information upfront. In future, I intend to begin feedback requests with a brief explanation of the work and its purpose, followed by the material I would like them to review. This approach aligns with my aim of making the feedback process efficient and respectful of colleagues’ time.

Although my course leader, Ella, was unable to offer detailed feedback, her brief message: “Go for it.” was warm, encouraging, and supportive. This reinforced my confidence in my approach. In addition, it reminded me how much I value her leadership quality of embracing shortcomings and mistakes which she also role-models, and thus creates our open, transparent and very mutually supportive team dynamic.

I found, another value of having critical friends in the workplace is that you are not only including them in your decision-making and thought process, which is beneficial for work organisation, but you open up more opportunities. Making colleagues aware of your projects enables them to recommend the work itself or you, based on the team skills you demonstrate, which include productivity, connectivity, and curiosity (UAL CAF, 2022).