How to navigate feedback cultures: strategies on a page

25 November 2025

In this post, CRADLE’s Professor Margaret Bearman reflects on a five-year study exploring feedback cultures in surgical and intensive care medicine settings, and introduces some practical one-page resources for supervisors and trainees.

Culture means many things to different people. Our work examining the influence of culture on feedback in medical specialty training suggests that the biggest influence on how feedback is done is not nation or institution – but your work practices.

We interviewed, observed and worked with many surgical and intensive care medicine trainees over several years. Then we put our thoughts together into practical one-page guides which offer trainees and supervisors simple strategies that yield considerable benefit for modest effort – as well as advanced strategies for supervisors who already possess some educational know-how.

We’ve found that many others, particularly from medicine and other health professions, have found these resources useful. They capture feedback ‘know-how’ as it is, not as we think it ought to be. They take account of the social and material realities of the clinic – challenges like rostering, limited time, shared spaces, and challenging situations. And although they were designed with medical settings in mind, many of the strategies can be translated to other contexts, including higher education and work-integrated learning.

So, we suggest you read through the resources, compare them, look at them – and ask yourself, how do these strategies stack up in your workplace?

• Feedback Strategies Complete Guide (PDF, 662KB)

And here are our three papers from this project to date – more to come!

Feedback with feelings: the human complexity of expressing judgements about performance

Trainees as teachers: Building evaluative judgement through peer teaching

Meaning making about performance: a comparison of two specialty feedback cultures

Research team

Professor Margaret Bearman (Deakin University, project lead), Professor Rola Ajjawi (University of British Columbia), Associate Professor Damian Castanelli (Monash Health), Dr Nicole Crawford (Deakin University), Dr Joanne Hilder (Southern Cross University), Dr Charlotte Denniston (University of Melbourne), Ms Paige Mahoney (Deakin University), Professor Elizabeth Molloy (University of Melbourne), Professor Chris Watling (Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada), and Professor Robyn Woodward-Kron (University of Melbourne).

See our other work on Feedback

Manifesto for feedback in the age of GenAI

CRADLE suggests… Feedback and GenAI

CRADLE suggests… Feedback strategies to make a difference

References

Bearman, M., Hilder, J., Castanelli, D., Molloy, E., Watling, C., Woodward-Kron, R., & Ajjawi, R. (2025). Feedback with feelings: the human complexity of expressing judgements about performance. Advances in Health Sciences Education. Advance Online Publication [Open Access]

Bearman, M., Castanelli, D. J., Molloy, E., & Ward, N. (2024). Trainees as teachers: Building evaluative judgement through peer teaching. The Clinical Teacher, 21(6), e13818. [Open Access]

Bearman, M., Ajjawi, R., Castanelli, D., Denniston, C., Molloy, E., Ward, N., & Watling, C. (2023) Meaning making about performance: a comparison of two specialty feedback cultures. Medical Education, 57(11), 1010-1019. [Open Access]