‘Students often can’t remember a lot of their feedback. But they remember the feeling it gave them.  ‘They are saying blah blah blah and you’re hearing  ‘that is shit, you’re shit.’

Blythman, M., Orr, S., & Blair, B. 2007. Critiquing the Crit [Online]

Teaching formats and strategies: On my course, we run reviews at key milestones in the year, and as a course under the direction of the stage leaders, the teaching team place a lot of effort to ensure that the experience proves to be a positive experience for each student regardless of what stage they might be in the development of their projects. The ways that we do this includes limiting the number of invited guests to one per panel and to ensure that the feedback is more conversational with the students rather than dominated by the tutor and guest. As tutors, we give both verbal feedback and written feedback in addition to asking a peer to scribe notes for the student presenting, which all seem to be well received by our student body.

We use screens which removes some of the comparisons inherent with traditional pin-ups, where students compare the amount they have completed and the quality of their work relative to others.

However, ‘Critiquing the Crit’, highlights other strategies that we could adopt better for the students across their different needs and abilities, such as:

• Doing some preparatory work to let students know what to expect in terms of the organisation, experience and anticipated outcomes from reviews, allowing students who may be less familiar or comfortable with reviews to know what to expect
• Using clear and direct language in verbal and written feedback, so that students can understand with ease what their next steps should be to develop their projects
• Make the set up of the crit as non-hierarchical as possible.