How do I offer feedback that can be heard? What if I want to offer or I am asked to give feedback to my supervisor or evaluator? What are the risks and consequences if I offer cool feedback? We strive for an open community of learners.  How will we grow if we do not seek, offer, and consider feedback?

The Faculty Staff Leadership Team (FSLT) working in collaboration with the Academic Leadership Team (ALT) accepted the challenge to design a protocol for offering feedback in our community.  We want to continue to further create an environment where feedback is sought after, given, and received respectfully, kindly, and with intention. Here are our starting point questions:

What is the one thing (or top 3) that is uppermost in your mind? What is your priority?

• When describing Trinity, what do we acknowledge as something we celebrate or should be celebrated?
• Concerning our community’s growth, what do you suggest for growth, learning, and improvement?
• What else would you like to share with and contribute to the entire Trinity community?

When FSLT and ALT met, the FSLT leaders, Kato Nims and Michelle Perry, led us through a discussion to modify and improve the above questions. How can we create a comfortable space for faculty and staff to offer feedback to the administrative team?

It was magical.  It was an awesome example of collaboration for community improvement. I have so much to learn from my colleagues!

The brainstorming phase offered these ideas from faculty, staff, and administrators:

• Being supportive vs. being defensive/complaining
• Positive Growth needs to be emphasized
• Open Discussion
• Think-Pair-Share to begin an open discussion about celebrations and growth opportunities.

Discussion/Share/Suggestions:

• Themes: Time, Balance, Change, and Follow Through,
• I wish and I’m grateful for…
• Great sentence starter: “As a member of the Trinity Community…”
• How do we broadcast to our community?
• Avoid questions that push towards negative/complaining responses
• Concerns over honestly sharing due to judgement: face-to-face dialogue in separate sessions  for faculty and staff
• Faculty vs. Staff questions…same or different?
• Good question (maybe two questions): What can we celebrate at Trinity and how can we continue to grow?
• Don’t get too specific because you then end up excluding people who are completing the survey.
• Some personal questions and some general questions
• Open-ended vs. closed questions

After the brainstorming phase, we boiled to down to the following 4 prompts.

• As a member of the Trinity Community, what can we celebrate?
• As a member of the Trinity Community, how can we continue to grow?
• As a member of the Trinity Community, I wish…
• As a member of the Trinity Community, I’m grateful…

We wanted to know if these prompts would help our community talk openly about the areas where we glow and where we might grow.  We decided, as a team, to “take the assessment” ourselves before implementing it school wide.

Will we comfortably and confidently be able to express our feelings and concerns?

We have planned to meet on Monday to “practice” the protocol and make any additional modifications.

I plan to post the formal “lesson plan” for this hour and some of the outcomes in a future post.