Collective verbal feedback as a strategy to elicit faculty feedback

"Upward Feedback," or feedback provided by trainees to their supervising faculty, is an important facet of faculty growth and development. However, educators report difficulty obtaining high-quality feedback from trainees through traditional feedback methods. "Collective feedback," elicited verbally from small groups of trainees, may hold promise to overcome this challenge.

We implemented collective feedback in a large Internal Medicine residency program to generate feedback for a group of core faculty educators and evaluated resident and faculty preceptions of this method.

Informed by sociocultural and psychological safety theories, we conducted six small group sessions to generate feedback for 15 core medicine inpatient faculty. The authors collated and distributed feedback to faculty. Surveys were utilized to assess resident and faculty perceptions of collective feedback compared to traditional online evaluations. The study took place from March to June 2024.

Thirty-one of 36 participating residents and 12 of 15 faculty completed the surveys (86% and 80% response rate, respectively). Faculty and trainees largely preferred collective feedback to traditional individual feedback. Trainees were able to provide more meaningful feedback without sacrificing confidentiality; the majority of faculty reported obtaining more actionable, specific, and timely feedback with "collective feedback."

Collective feedback may be a promising method to collect upward feedback in internal medicine residency programs with small cohorts of residents and faculty that work together frequently. Future studies are needed to assess impact on faculty behavior, long-term resident engagement in this method and generalizability to other settings.