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What matters for productive feedback? Disciplinary practices and their relational dynamics Most research on feedback has paid limited attention to the role of disciplines and their relational dynamics. This article addresses this limitation by offering a conceptualisation of feedback as a relational process that emerges through feedback encounters shaped by the educational and professional practices of the discipline. Using data from a qualitative case study of an undergraduate software engineering course unit, it explores the relational dynamics between different elements of the course and how these dynamics matter for the emergence of productive feedback encounters. The findings show that a wide range of productive feedback encounters occurred between students and both human and material sources throughout the course. Feedback encounters were productive when students had the opportunity to navigate the tools and conventions necessary to participate in the educational practices of the course and, by extension, the discipline's professional practices. Different learning activities were characterised by distinctive relational dynamics that provided various opportunities and constraints for productive feedback encounters to emerge. The findings demonstrate the importance of accounting for disciplinary practices and their relational aspects when designing for learning activities that aim to enable students to productively seek out and engage with feedback.

In the wake of a growing emphasis on students taking a more central role in shaping their own learning, it has become increasingly important that course designs cater for productive feedback. This study explores how feedback opportunities were incorporated into two course designs that in different ways aimed at engaging students actively in knowledge construction, and what might have contributed to making feedback in those contexts productive. A thematic analysis of course documents and interviews with teachers and students reveals that both courses included productive feedback opportunities. These were generated by arranging task and responsibilities in such ways that students could make use of feedback in their immediate work and their future learning. Our findings suggest that planning for productive feedback entails more than generating good feedback comments. Instead, teachers should view feedback as integral to their course designs and consider the practices of their disciplines during the planning process.

Over the past decades, peer review of teaching has become commonplace at many universities around the world. Though research on the topic is expanding, much of the literature is composed of qualitative studies that offer relevant empirical findings but often have limited foundations in theory. Using a framework synthesis approach, we synthesize the empirical findings of 48 qualitative articles on peer review of teaching into a comprehensive conceptual framework drawing on sociocultural perspectives of learning. We propose the term “collegial faculty development” (CFD) to encompass all practices that support faculty in developing their teaching quality by drawing on the expertise of their colleagues. Our framework conceptualizes the main elements of CFD and shows how different contextual, individual, and relational factors shape the way CFD unfolds. Based on these theoretical considerations, we discuss issues of intersubjectivity, materiality, and temporality as potential avenues for further research.