The Importance of Self-reflection as a Building Block to Providing Peer Feedback to Optimize Team Performance
Background:
Giving and receiving feedback is a critical component for enhancing team performance, allowing learners the opportunity for self-reflection and to identify areas for improvement. However, published data suggest that students may struggle with providing constructive feedback to peers on team performance. To prepare students with the skills necessary to provide feedback to peers, they may need to first practice honest self-reflection of their own team behaviors. The purpose of this study was to characterize students’ self-assessment of their team performance and describe identified opportunities for growth.
Methods:
This observational, retrospective study gathered data from students enrolled in Team-Based Clinical Decision Making, a 14-week IPE course required for students from dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and social work. Students worked in teams of eight, with most teams having students from each health discipline. Early in the course, teams established a contract defining their expectations for five key attributes of a high-performing team member: preparedness, reliability, engagement, active listening, and attitude. Throughout the semester, students self-evaluated their performance for each attribute, rating their performance on a 10-point Likert scale and identifying opportunities for improvement. Descriptive statistics were used to characterize quantitative data; a thematic analysis was done for qualitative responses for any student who self-rated any attribute at 5 or lower.
Results:
The study included all 489 students enrolled in the course in winter 2024. The median self-rate score across all five attributes ranged from 8 to 10 depending on the attribute. Reliability (10) and active listening (9) scored the highest, followed by preparedness, engagement, and attitude (all of which scored 8). While the median scores were high and skewed to the left, there were students for each of the attributes who self-rated their performance with scores of 5 or less. Common themes identified as opportunities for improvement included being better prepared, actively contributing to team discussions, actively listening to team members, encouraging others to speak up, acknowledging and validating others’ viewpoints, and staying present during team discussions.
Conclusions:
Honest self-reflection is an important step to help students learn how to provide honest, constructive feedback to others.
Reflection
The ability to honestly self-reflect on one’s own performance as a member of the team is an important part of being able to provide honest, constructive feedback to others.