What is 360 Feedback?
One of the best ways to improve knowledge and teaching is implementing 360 feedback, also known as multi-source feedback. This allows learners to receive actionable feedback towards growth and improvement. As an assessor or tutor, it’s important that you know about and understand what 360 feedback is. As it’s essential to know about this to help make your teaching and assessing better for your learners. So let’s go through what 360 feedback is.
What is 360 Feedback?
360 feedback is a feedback method where not just your manager, but peers and direct reports evaluate yourself or your learner. You’ll have to analyse how the learner is perceived and how they perceive themselves. 360 feedback can also be known as multi-rater feedback. It gathers feedback on a person from multiple different sources. It’s normally used as a learning and development aid. It gives the individual better information about their skills, performance and working relationships.
The individual wanting the feedback would complete a self-perception questionnaire or survey. Then they ask 6 to 10 people to give feedback using a similar survey. It provides confidential, anonymous feedback.
The information collected from the sources gives an insight into individuals’ behaviour and capabilities, from a range of different viewpoints. Information received from 360 feedback can serve as the basis for a discussion of key behaviours that impact you or your learners. To have successful 360 feedback it’s important to take steps to ensure you receive data that is actionable.
Stages of 360 activities
There are 8 key stages when it comes to 360 activities. These are:
- Considering the issues
- Defining the focus
- Designing the questionnaire
- Deciding on the rating scale
- Managing the feedback
- Analysing the data
- Understanding the data
- Applying the outcomes
It can be difficult for learners to receive an evaluation based on 360 feedback, as negative responses affect self-esteem. Alternatively, glowing praise can discourage self-reflection and self-motivation. Teachers should look at feedback with specific questions in mind. The questions are:
- What was the most surprising aspect of the feedback?
- Did the feedback identify already known issues?
- What was of most concern?
- What was more significant?
- If strengths were identified, do they need to be explored?
- If there are areas that require development, in what order should this be done and what assistance may be needed?
Implementing 360 feedback takes time. You should focus on the length and frequency of the evaluations, as well as the guidelines to discuss after the evaluation. Learners need to reflect on the feedback, which helps their critical thinking skills and promotes deeper learning. They gain skills which assist in their future learning and the feedback can make teachers more effective and improve their teaching quality.
Actions you can do
We’re going to go through four actions which you can do to implement 360 feedback.
Self-assessment
One of the most effective ways for someone to improve is through reflection. Self-assessment in 360 feedback allows you to evaluate yourself or your learners on a number of criteria. This enables you to identify strengths and areas for improvement. Self-assessment and self-observation allow you to reflect on your goals and practices. The self-evaluation also provides a benchmark to compare with the data provided by other raters in the review.
Comprehensive feedback
360 evaluations provide you with a comprehensive view of the behaviours and actions. While course assessments just provide student feedback, 360 requires reviews to gather insights from a variety of relevant sources. Additionally, the feedback provided from multiple perspectives offers a more complete and balanced picture. In fact, multi-rater feedback also helps lessen bias, improving the data quality.
Peer review
Alternatively, having others rate your performance provides a unique perspective and can evaluate quality in a deeper way, maybe more than you can. Peer reviews hold useful information that can help you improve teaching and learning practices. In addition, these reviews are a valuable way to identify strengths and weaknesses and if they could benefit from development, such as more training and learning.
Continuous improvement
360 feedback is ideal for improvement because of how it measures behaviours and competencies. Suitable for training and development. The commitment to continuous improvement starts with your goals. The 360 self-assessment and multi-rater feedback help you identify key areas for improvement, so you have a baseline for where you need to go.
If you have any questions about 360 feedback please don’t hesitate to contact us at training@brooksandkirk.ac.uk and we would be happy to help.
Steve is a Chartered Manager and a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute.
He provides Educational Consultancy to the 19+ sector as well as being an Assessor, IQA, EPA and Digital Marketing Professional. When not doing any of these he finds time, every now and then, to write blogs and articles.