Horrendous and very personal feedback from student

[belle40]

Hello,

I have been working in HE for a number of years so I am familiar with student feedback mechanisms for modules. Today I have had my first experience of direct extremely personal and offensive feedback from a student in a PG cohort.

I work in a professionally regulated programme and so the feedback ( which is anonymous) would contravene the professional behaviours expected by the students.

A summary of the feedback is presented at a larger student / programme meeting although specific personal comments are redacted by the PL.

I wondered if anyone else had dealt with this and any advice to manage the cohort going forward?

I had this, a very personal attack on my teaching, professionalism and frankly me as a person.

im afraid I took the decision to leave teaching, not solely because of this but because I did not feel supported by management and did not like the way teaching is going in general. In no other profession would we be expected to just accept personal anonymous attacks on us in this way.

I would suggest approaching it with your union but also addressing how to be professional when giving feedback with the students. Make it clear that it is unacceptable.

also, women lecturers are more likely to receive such personal attacks than their male counterparts. Last year one student gave the same personal negative feedback to three female members of staff in my department.

it’s deeply unpleasant and completely unacceptable

Thanks for your response @tryingtobesogood I'm sorry you left teaching because of this.

Really helpful to hear your views as the same type of comment has been made about four female lecturers in different modules in this round.

Can I ask which field you moved into?

I hadn’t been a lecturer for very long (did my PhD later in life and had lots of prior teaching experience) so decided to take a post doc, on a fixed term contract with the hope of making a research based career. It’s a gamble but I am so much happier, and when I hear from my former colleagues about the constant pressures they are under I know I did the right thing. (I had a different username when I first came on mumsnet, and got good advice from this board that helped me make that decision).

I had also looked at industry and the civil service.

So sorry @belle40 its horrible and totally unprofessional.

Has your Department got your back? Can there be a department-wide discussion with students about giving constructive feedback likely to be productive?

Giving and receiving feedback which can make a difference is an important skill we all need to hone.

But also -

there was a meta study done in France I think, which demonstrated that student feedback was a better indication of students’ race and sex biases than the quality of the teaching.

And also remember, teaching and learning are separate processes - linked, of course, but still different. You are not responsible for their learning; they are. Good teaching is making or facilitating accessible and appropriate opportunities to learn.

I lead a professionally regulated programme. In a situation like this, I'd expect the PL to meet with the cohort and remind them of professional expectations around feedback. I hope you're getting support OP, this sort of thing can be really upsetting.

This has happened to me on a few occasions. My manager now removes personal attacks before we see them and regular reminders are given to students regarding professional and respectful communication.
It helps a lot to have management support and encouragement to ignore. This has not always been the case and I still remember some of them word for word.
It’s really not ok.

Thanks everyone. It has really upset me and I have spoken to the PL who has escalated it to the HOD. We can't see who the feedback is from but my PL can see all of the personal comments are from one student. It is incredibly disheartening when we work very hard to support students.

It’ll be some misogynistic bellend presumably. He should face sanctions.

I worked for 25 years in HE in France. I advised other people coming into the profession in my teams not to read the student feedback. Any feedback they really needed to hear would get to my ears and I’d give it.

My boss would only take a few points of student feedback into consideration because the rest weren’t useful.

Definitely agree about filtering feedback - if i can see that there's one individual who's making personal attacks amid a general set of positive and/or constructive feedback I take those comments out before they go any further (I do also make sure every student gets opportunities one to one to raise any serious concerns though as well as having other sources of pastoral support if they were trying to raise genuine concerns or get help with a personal issue).

For managing the cohort going forward I'd suggest a session for all students - preferably led by a senior member of faculty who has some 'bite' in terms of potentially being able to dish out sanctions - reminding students of the code of conduct. Go into detail. Make them explain the rules to you, and give examples - "so when we say polite, what does that look like? What examples can you give?". Tell them that unfortunately someone has recently shown that this session is necessary because the comments made would constitute a breach of professional standards if those students had passed their course and were out in the working world which would probably mean losing their license/certification/professional reputation. Use examples from the feedback without telling the students who received it and let the reactions of the other students underline just how inappropriate the feedback was for the one who left it.

If it is personal feedback towards 4 women from one student then that needs to be removed from any reports and the management needs to find out who it was and remove them from the cohort. They won't of course, but this is totally unacceptable to go without being dealt with.

I sorry this happened to you, OP. It's really shit. As another poster said, it'll be a jumped-up, entitled little misogynist who probably didn't even attend that many of your classes, and had minimal engagement with those he was at.

Please don't take this the wrong way but what's actually at stake here for you? I mean, is the student feedback being used for your performance review? Or for promotion benchmarking? If not, then the feedback matters no more than the ravings if some lunatic on the bus.

If the feedback will be used for something like promotion or performance then you should remove these personal comments from the dataset and make your various managers aware of why you've done that.

If not, I'd just extract what you need from the feedback documents - we get ours as PDF - then just delete the original documents, and get on with your life.

It's really petty but if you ever teach this boy's cohort again, I'd be really effusive about your excellent feedback. Like "It's great to see teaching you all again. I wanted to say thank you so much for such positive feedback on [Module Title] last term. I was so touched to see how much you'd all enjoyed it and learned from it. There were some really very lovely comments which really did make me so chuffed to read".

But I'm very petty so this might not work for you!

Again, I'm so sorry this has happened, OP.

Also, if misogyny is behind it (which it sadly almost always is in my experience), get a senior male colleague to read that student the riot act, including sharing the data on biased evaluations with the whole cohort. The cohort will likely react, and seeing their peers’ reactions might make student think twice in future.
Hope you’re getting lots of support.

What everyone else said. Definitely don’t take it personally, OP. I remember in my first academic job, very unsupported, only a couple of months after my PhD viva, being really upset at personal remarks/comments on body, voice, clothes etc on a student feedback questionnaire (back in the paper form days) — then I realised, looking more closely at it and talking to a senior female colleague who taught the other half of the same module, that this young misogynist couldn’t tell us apart! I was 30 years younger than her and the best part of a foot taller, but as far as he was concerned, we were just two annoying female authority figures at the far end of a big lecture theatre.

Do we know it’s a male student?

It beggars belief in my mind that your manager would have let all of that feedback come through to you without reviewing it first. That's not good management and so unfair and hurtful to you. Personal nasty feedback also says a lot more about the person who wrote it than the lecturer - I mean, who does that?

I thought this would be standard practice that feedback goes directly to us, without being filtered/edited by managers.

At my place feedback is accessed by module leaders directly via the online learning platform (VLE site) as soon as its available. It doesn't go through managers first. Even if it did, the feedback is directly generated as a PDF from the MEQ form, so I don't think managers could edit or remove things anyway.

i think the employer is at fault here for not using third party to review feedback before it is distributed.

I worked in a large organization with a 360* feedback process. They used software and outsourced humans (confidentiality agreements signed). to review all comments. Anything inappropriate was flagged and just not relevant was removed. In many cases there was additional follow up - safeguarding, disclosure etc.

Your colleagues should not see lies, inappropriate language, disparaging comments - the goal is to improve performance… not revenge or humiliation.

I’ve been an academic at three institutions in two countries since 2002, and have never had student feedback go through a manager or be filtered.

@TuesdaysAreBest, I can’t answer for the OP, obviously, but the ‘I wouldn’t even do you doggystyle’ remarks on the feedback form I referred to up the thread suggested so, though obviously anonymous.

ha ha ha ha! You're not talking about a university here ... no way would so many resources be used to look after lecturers by their employers!

Universities tend to combine the best bits of the autonomous professional following her nose through curiosity in research & teaching with the worst bits of modern commercial management.

It's a bonkers & increasingly dysfunctional combination.

Still wouldn’t hurt to have someone like HR cast an eye, as researchers should know sometimes data needs to be removed if there’s a rogue participant …

University HR do not exist to protect or support minion-level staff. They give no shits whatsoever about the very basics of universities as workplaces. So, they're not going to start bothering their arses with making sure academics' feelings aren't hurt by student feedback.

Plus, I could see students taking issue with their feedback being altered by 'external' (I mean external to the student - department - module - lecturer network) people before being sent to academics. I think they'd be right in this, to be honest. Researchers also know that what's decided to be 'rogue' data is a highly subjective decision...

I suppose it depends on the comment / data you are talking about.

Feedback that isn’t related to improving work performance has no place in a performance review.
Foul language, inappropriate/racist/sexust/hate language & comments should be removed or edited. If it could not be said in workplace, then should not be in feedback.

Re HR not protecting minions - your university has a responsibility to provide a safe working environment, so removing hateful comments would protect the university.