by Erin Isings, Cecilia S. Dong, Christine E. Bell,The Conversation

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Imagine you're awaiting important feedback. For professionals, this could be a performance appraisal from your boss. For students, it could be written comments and a grade on an important paper.

For many people, this waiting period involves dread, anxiety, stress and other negative emotions. And once the much-anticipatedfeedbackarrives, its receptionmay be clouded in emotions that result in a disengagement withthe feedback process: shock, rejection or confusion. It's an emotional blow that canreally affect the feedback recipient's well-being and sense of self.

Although feedback cansometimes feel painful, it might be the best gift to help our learning and growth.

Receiving feedback helps us to gain an accurate awareness of our actual performance in relation to the expected or needed outcome—whether that's on the job or in school.

Feedback helps us understand how to close that gap between where we are versus where we need to be and improve our skills. Without the guidance that comes from feedback, we're fumbling in the dark.

With proper feedback, we can clearly see our strengths and our opportunities for learning. Yet feedbackliteracy—the process of engaging with feedback and using it to improve—is a skill that is rarely taught in school.

Feedback literacytypically involves four phases:

As university educators who teach students in communications, dentistry and undergraduate medical sciences, our previous research on feedback literacy showed thatstudents who have higher levels of feedback literacy also have higher levels of mindfulness and lower levels of overall stress.

From this, we wanted to look at whether students would benefit from learning more feedback literacy skills—and at the same time, have their well-being and emotions supported through mindfulness.

We developed a program to teach students how to become more literate with feedback, while managing their stress responses to that feedback.

To support managing feedback-induced stress, we thought that perhapsmindfulness, or focusing on the present moment without judgment, would help minimize the negative emotions around receiving feedback. Without being distracted by the emotion, students could focus on the feedback and improve their learning.

Working with a multidisciplinary team, we designed a "co-curricular course"—an online module that could be completed by students in different disciplines to support the core curriculum.This entails six 30-minute lessons that apply mindfulness to feedback literacy, made available through Western University's online learning management system.

We then met with students who went through the lessons to ask them about their experiences. While we had hoped to hear that they were able to see past the negative emotions when receiving feedback, and develop an appreciation for it, wefound some unexpected results.

Beyond students no longer focusing on thenegative emotionsaround feedback, they went as far to report that skills from the course helped them reframe their views on the whole feedback process.

Instead of feedback being a painful and nerve-racking experience, students reported that they began to welcome and seek out feedback. One student reported looking forward to receiving it and asking her supervisor at a clinical placement to give her as much feedback as possible.

Another student who had previously avoided speaking to professors out of fear of being seen as a "problem student" began to ask for clarification to decode assignment feedback. Students reported they began to eagerly ask questions to deepen their understanding of the feedback they received and consequently improve their learning.

Another focus group participant, a dental student, reported using the mindfulness techniques to help her stay calm while performing a dental procedure on a patient, recognizing that she needed to stay focused to avoid upsetting the patient and to complete the tooth procedure.

A further surprise was that students reported applying the mindfulness techniques to minimize stress and increase their well-being in scenarios such as:

Overall, focus group participants reported increased well-being due to stronger coping mechanisms for stress inacademic workand in other life aspects.

This research contributes to understanding the short- and potentially longer-term benefits of learning about feedback literacy ormindfulness as a complementary part ofacademic study or professional training.

Whether you're walking into a performance appraisal, or your child is anticipating a grade return, here are some things to remember:

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.

Provided by The Conversation