Developing essential professional skills: a framework for teaching and learning about feedback
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Updated: Aug 18, 2026

Movement Retraining using Real-time Feedback of Performance
Published on: January 17, 2013
Penny Henderson1, Anne C Ferguson-Smith, Martin H Johnson
1Department of Anatomy, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3DY, UK. ph286@cam.ac.uk
Background:
The ability to give and receive feedback effectively is a key skill for doctors, aids learning between all levels of the medical hierarchy, and provides a basis for reflective practice and life-long learning. How best to teach this skill?
Discussion:
We suggest that a single "teaching the skill of feedback" session provides superficial and ineffective learning in a medical culture that often uses feedback skills poorly or discourages feedback. Our experience suggests that both the skill and the underlying attitude informing its application must be addressed, and is best done so longitudinally and reiteratively using different forms of feedback delivery. These feedback learning opportunities include written and oral, peer to peer and cross-hierarchy, public and private, thereby addressing different cognitive processes and attitudinal difficulties.
Summary:
We conclude by asking whether it is possible to build a consensus approach to a framework for teaching and learning feedback skills?
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