After outlining her work on feedback engagement in the School of Education, in this follow up blog, Anthonia Daikpor shares her experiences and reflections of leading a workshop on emotions and feedback engagement.
By Anthonia Daikpor, MSc Education (Feedback Engagement Fellow for the School of Education)
In late January ’26, I held a workshop in the School of Education centred on a topic many students experience but rarely talk about openly: emotional responses to academic feedback. My project focused on understanding how emotions shape, and sometimes block, students’ engagement with feedback, and sometimes block, students’ engagement with feedback, and the workshop was designed to offer a safe space for reflection and reframing.
I wanted students to recognise that the emotional response feedback may provoke, such as frustration, disappointment, relief, and motivation, are valid and have an influence on their engagement. More importantly, I wanted them to leave knowing that an unexpected or low grade is not a reflection of who they are as a person, and that it doesn’t need to define how they move forward academically.
Before the actual workshop day, I was nervous. Talking about feelings isn’t something most students rush to sign up for, and I was worried people simply wouldn’t show up. Still, I prepared my slides and activities and leaned heavily on the support of the student services team in the School of Education to help spread the word about the postcards and the workshop itself.
I was also incredibly fortunate to have the support of the Feedback Engagement Fellows from the School of Economics, Munirat Yakubu and Shloka Breed. They helped set up the technical aspects, registered attendees, shared materials, and moved around the room answering questions as they came up. The workshop would not have run as smoothly without them. Mia Stevens, the Undergraduate Education Officer and a member of the Feedback Engagement Fellow team, was also present and had played a huge role in pre-workshop preparations.
In the workshop, there were icebreakers and live Mentimeter polls about emotions. While snacking and after short pieces of literature to ground our discussions, we moved into the main activity. Students pulled up feedback from any of their course units and wrote out the key message they took from that feedback. Then they jotted down their emotional response and reflected on whether that response had been helpful or harmful to their learning. It was meant to be a quiet exercise, to allow students to sit with how their feedback lands before deciding what to do with it. After the individual reflections, they were able to discuss openly about their emotional experiences with feedback, and most importantly, realise they weren’t alone. What stayed with me most were the moments when they shared how the workshop caused shifts in their perspectives, and a few started outlining plans for engaging with feedback in the new teaching block. Some of the comments shared in the workshop included:
“Now I’ve got to go over my feedback again with a different attitude”
“This (workshop) was helpful to not make the same mistakes again…”
“I came into my program thinking I’m going to nail this, and when my grade wasn’t what I expected, I thought it was a failing of my person and felt kind of blocked from interacting with my new materials in TB2, and I had to break out of that, and this workshop has sort of helped to start breaking out of that mental block”
“It’s a little frustrating, and recently I tried to reframe my thoughts, and I feel I can do better, and I have the ability to do better…”
A few participants also came up to me afterwards to say they were glad they had actually attended, and the post-workshop conversations were just as meaningful as the activities I had planned. Finally, students were also able to log a skill activity ‘Proactive about my wellbeing’ on the Bristol Skills Profile. I included this last bit to create a space for students to connect emotional awareness directly to their personal development.
My personal thoughts and what’s next?
On a personal level, this workshop was as much for me as it was for my peers. I completed the activity in my own time because I also needed to learn how to separate my emotions from the grades I received and use that energy constructively as I moved into the new teaching block. Perhaps most importantly, I’ve learned to trust the process. I tend to worry about every detail and aim for everything to be perfect, but planning and running this workshop reminded me that meaningful projects are often messy. And it’s from that mess, from real conversations, mixed emotions, and unexpected insights, that the most useful learning may emerge. For anyone planning to help promote feedback engagement at the University, I will suggest trying to understand why students shy away from their feedback and then building solutions around those reasons. Students often share more openly in informal spaces, and this is where initiatives like this, supported by BILT and Bristol SU, have real potential, because solutions are coming from insiders who understand the context.
I also gathered data through postcards placed in the School of Education foyer. Out of 115 postcards placed, 53 were completed and returned to the ballot box (49 from postgraduate students and 4 from undergraduates). Of those responses, 21 students reported being ‘Most Likely’ to look back on their feedback for future submissions. While modest, this offered useful insight into current engagement patterns and revealed the clear differences between undergraduate and postgraduate experiences.
I recently attended a focus group run by the Undergraduate ALSS Faculty Representatives, Francesca Blackburn and Teo Guez, which explored undergraduate experiences of formative assessment. The conversations helped me better understand the low undergraduate response to the postcards and workshop. These insights are already shaping the next stage of my project. I’m currently thinking about new ways to support undergraduate feedback engagement, whether through another workshop or by creating a short video checklist focused on how to work with feedback. You’ll have to stay tuned to see what comes next 😊.
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