Reciprocal Student–Teacher Feedback: Effects on Perceived Quality of Cooperation and Teacher Health

Abstract

AbstractHigh lesson quality in schools is, in addition to other factors, the result of good cooperation between teachers and students. The long history of research on offer-use models of lesson quality and student–teacher relationships documents this interaction. Feedback focused on expressing the quality of cooperation can lead to higher quality of cooperation. The fact that feedback is reciprocal, from teacher to student and vice versa, helps to avoid effects of perceived injustice and rejections of feedback which otherwise are severe obstacles to the efficient use of feedback. High-frequency applications of feedback allow for the timely detection of (positive and negative) critical fluctuations of cooperation between individuals and groups and for the monitoring of processes of adaptation, as shown in other areas of applied psychology. This chapter describes the theoretical parameters of such a feedback method for students and teachers, and outlines results of an empirical study on the effects of the reciprocal method on (1) perceived quality of cooperation and (2) teacher health. Results show that, subsequent to a three-month period of reciprocal feedback, the quality of cooperation as perceived by both students and their teachers increases significantly and teacher health scores improve significantly. Reciprocal feedback techniques should be considered in teacher education and teacher training as a way to help teachers to initiate processes of improvement of lesson quality.