International journal of pedagogy innova

12 10.5604/01.3001.0010.4978 International Journal of Pedagogy Innovation and New Technologies journal homepage: http://www.ijpint.com ISSN: 2392-0092,  Vol 4,  2,  No 1,  2,  2017 2015 Exploiting the values of negative feedback from students’ reflections as an innovative approach for pedagogical professional development Duy Khang Nguyễn CONTACT: Duy Khang Nguyễn, PhD, Vinh Long Community College, 112A Dinh Tien Hoang Street, Ward 8, Vinh Long City,Vinh Long Province, Vietnam, E-mail: ndkhang@vlcc.edu.vn This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Keywords: Abstract: feedback, innovation, pedagogy, professional development, students’ reflection, higher education This paper investigates how the values of negative feedback from students’ reflections should be exploited and utilized as an approach of pedagogical development It was extracted as a step of the 3-year-action-research circles with an empirical study using the data collected from 96 cases of students’ reflections in a university of Poland for both qualitative and quantitative analysis Regardless the limitation of the diversity of the research tools and types of data, the study found the noticeable lessons through the process of problematizing the significant learning The data was framed from the negative awareness at the wording and surface levels for quantitative descriptive and then these signals were directed to locate the messages holding the negative signals for qualitative analysis Eight groups of codes were categorized using Atlas.ti from 172 quotations, extracted from 140 extracts of 96 cases of students’ reflections The findings show that the negative signals are important to the teacher’s modifications and actions to alternate the future plans and teaching In addition, seven problems were also generated from analyzing the quotations using this design The attempts to fix these problems would facilitate the teachers to improve the skills of teaching and quality of the course A different way of looking at students’ negative signals of this paper could be seen as an innovative approach to pedagogical development in comparison to the common usage of feedback itself which has been exploited divergently in education Introduction The ideas of this paper may be controversial with plenty of questions regarding the reasons hooking the teachers’ attentions to students’ reflections or feedback However, teaching is a job with endless goals and satisfaction or uncounted changes and development From that sense, Giesta (2017)1 asserts that one will not deserve as a teacher if he or she seeks the satisfaction of students about his or her courses through their feedback or reflections Therefore, the teachers’ attitudes, actions, and the ways how the feedback should be exploited when receiving negative feedback should be discussed Much research has been conducted regarding the usage of feedback in education (Carless, 2006; Weaver, 2006, Quinton & Smallbone, 2010; Pates, Blake & Cooper, 2010; Adcroft, 2011; Thurlings, Vermeulen, Bastiaens, and Stijnen, 2012; Voerman, Meijer, Korthagen & Simons, 2015; Small & Attree, 2015; van de Ridder et al, 2015; Tuytens & Devos, 2017) However, the feedback is popularly used from the manner of the teachers to students and of the teachers to other teachers In particular, the purposes of using feedback are mainly to provide students with suggestions for them to improve their learning and practices (teachers to students) or to share with other teachers the ideas, evaluation, comments, and contributions (peers to peers and supervisors 1  Quotations from the lectures of Professor Gert Biesta on March 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, 2017 in Gdansk DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0010.4978 Vol 4, No 1, 2017, pp 16-26 Duy Khang Nguyễn  •  Exploiting the values of negative feedback from students’ reflections as an innovative approach for pedagogical 17 to new teachers) In some other situations, feedback is also utilized as a channel for the administrators and educators to refer or measure the performances of the teachers This paper is pointing out a different use of feedback in the form of students’ reflection after a learning course in the university context While the direct feedback for the act of pseudo-teaching was the main focus, students were encouraged to share their comments and evaluation to the teacher’s the course design and teaching activities at the end of the course This usage of students’ reflective2 feedback differs itself from the common forms of feedback that the teacher did not give students the reflective messages for their learning improvement as usual or sought for the satisfaction from the students through the course, but mainly searched for the signals of negatives in order to self-reflect and improve the professional development of the selfness To clarify these differences, the definition and common usages of feedback will be described and then the methodology and results of this research will be introduced Feedback and its common usages “Including understanding assessment criteria, experiences of feedback and the language used in feedback, the majority of research into feedback, therefore, approaches the subject matter from a technical process perspective.” (Adcroft, 2011: 405) Actually, a notion of active feedback which refers to a group of students with a further set of discussion activities after receiving the comments or reflections is pointed out by Pates et al (2010) Also, feedback is popularly used as a means of communication between the teachers and the learners, the supervisors and new teachers, or among peers in many circumstances In Weaver (2006), feedback is considered to be academic circles which provide reflection and development “Alerting students to their strengths and weaknesses can provide the means by which they can assess their performance and make improvements to future work.” (Weaver, 2006: 379) In a study about feedback behavior, Voeman et al (2015) provide interventions with observable effects on teacher classroom behavior to help them apply the theory of using feedback for successful learning-enhancing occurrences Feedback is also commonly used in the manner of peer-coaching professional activities in which it focuses on the type of teacher-to-teacher for the expectations of effective feedback (Thurlings, Vermeulen, Bastiaens, and Stijnen; 2012) Similarly, Tuytens and Devos (2017) recalled the traditional definition of feedback in which the supervisor evaluated and provided information to the “new” teachers regardless any forms of speech and not limited to only dialogues or direct conversation for reflection “Feedback is provided on a daily basis to teachers, school leaders also stress the importance of formal feedback moments during the teacher evaluation process.” (Tuytens and Devos, 2017:13) In addition, in a study of Small and Attree (2015), feedback was researched from the aspects of academics and students’ expectations in the process of receiving these assessments to learn from their own performances and mistakes In this context, feedback was used as a way to achieve learning regarding its values which might depend on the different receivers’ perceived degrees of its carrying messages “There were perceived differences in the actual use and value of the feedback, including academics believing that the feedback was more valuable than students perceived it to be and students believing that there 2  On reflexive approach to past events see: (Odrowaz-Coates, Perkowska-Klejman 2016) DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0010.4978 Vol 4, No 1, 2017, pp 16-26 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Prior to the design and discussion of the study, it is vital to review the notion of feedback and its common usages in pedagogical contexts Feedback has been defined differently and applied in various contexts According to Carless (2006), feedback has many functions which attribute to the quality teaching In a systematic study about feedback, Adcroft (2011) reviewed a series of definitions of feedback regarding its functions, its categories, its subjects, its role for the users, its dimensions, its relationship with other matters, its values in students’ learning, writing, or guiding for further improvement, and so on 18 Duy Khang Nguyễn  •  Exploiting the values of negative feedback from students’ reflections as an innovative approach for pedagogical were inconsistencies in grading processes Another perceived difference may be based on the purpose of the feedback; for example, students may expect feedback to provide an explanation of how they should improve, whereas academics may perceive the primary purpose to be a process that stimulates self-regulation.” (Small and Attree, 2015:2) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Feedback is interchangeably utilized as “teaching reflection” to offer students an experiential base to engage with reflection and learn throughout their higher education (Quinton and Smallbone, 2010: 125) It can be drawn from the popular usages of feedback that regardless of its structures and functions it can be listed as “reflection”, “reflective dialogue”, “teacher feedback”, “reflective feedback”, “reflective assessment, and so on Also, reviewing a series of research related to feedback and how it is applied in education has shown that feedback is commonly exploited from the aspects of experienced teachers or educational leaders to give advice, comment, or evaluation for “the newbie” or learners However, when searching for the notion of “negation” or “negative feedback”, Voeman et al (2015) mentioned “negative feedback” in comparison with the positive one In this study, it is assumed that positive feedback would contribute more to effectively enhancement of learning Similarly, Weaver (2006) showed a focus on the negative; however, it is to mean the types of comments as positive and negative in which students prefer the positive for their good feelings In all, regarding all that what feedback is, how it is commonly used, and to what extend its negative notion is meant, it is hard to find the signals of “negative feedback” and feedback from the students to the teacher That is why this new aspect of feedback will be exploited within the students’ reflective feedback to their teacher after a course at higher education level from a negative direction Of course, it will not be easy to discover the negative sides of how a class is organized or how students have learned from their reflection For that sake, this paper continues with the description of the methodological concepts of the study and the findings in which the negative signals will be analyzed and discussed for a different glance of pedagogical professional development Methodological concepts The idea of describing how the values of negative feedback from students’ reflections are exploited as an innovative approach for pedagogical professional development is developed from a three-year educational action research Primarily, this action research focuses on the learning signals which require both teachers and students to be engaged in the learning process and preparation for significant learning The whole research aims to answer the question of “how does learners’ significant learning be facilitated and emancipated through an action research?” In the original design, this action research was conducted with different research tools for documental evidence (Elliot, 1991) of students’ significant learning from the course design, students’ expectation, self-reflecting journal-entries after each class meeting, and students’ reflection about the course The participants were mainly Polish students taking the bachelor program of pedagogy in early education with English Beside Polish students, some Erasmus students who studied pedagogy might select this course for their learning which made up 108 participants in total These 108 students were from groups of students of this major in their second year of learning However, this paper focuses on describing the analysis of only the signals of negative feedback from students’ 96 reflections from the aspect of pedagogical professional development for the teachers Regarding this paper, the data of student reflections were collected as a channel for a step in action research for finding a teacher’s influences on significant learning and how students react to the lessons Reflections in this study consist of both the aspects of being reflective from the givers (at this sense, reflection is different from presenting the performances as for getting feedback) and providing feedback to the teachers (which may consists of both negative and positive assessment from students) Dewey (1933) shares ideas about the role of reflection in education as the tool to increase the learning of students, and contemporarily count for teachers at the same time Reflection is considered as the main characteristic of growth and development in “the learning profession” of teaching job (Darling-Hammond & Sykes, 1999) In fact, it is undeniable that reflection or reflective processes or products have a vital role in many areas Data from 96 cases of students’ reflections consisted of about 17.500 words which were the combination of 1.327 unique words This calculation displays the findings regarding the repeated counts of word choices DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0010.4978 Vol 4, No 1, 2017, pp 16-26 Duy Khang Nguyễn  •  Exploiting the values of negative feedback from students’ reflections as an innovative approach for pedagogical 19 that students used in their reflections The collection of words for this analysis was associated with the notions of classroom management and the signals of negations to be the negative awareness for the teacher’s further steps in learning from the whole action research of the main study The following section will focus on the method of analyzing the negative signals to clarify how the teacher should change their professional habits due to the new usage of feedback from students, but not commonly from the teachers or other sorts of evaluation Method of analysis for the negative signals Findings This part represents the findings regarding the analysis of the overall information regarding negative signals from students’ reflections at the surface level Then, the extracts will be located in accordance with the negative signals for further qualitative analysis The reasons for finding the meanings of students’ reflection using the method of word analysis were to make sure that the teachers would not understand the reflection subjectively or solely for the sake of one’s satisfaction The reflections might have different meanings depending on their opinions which are understood through their voices Students’ reflections were used as a channel for feedback so that the teacher checked their teaching process and goals after the course for possible modifications and experienced lessons Looking at the negative feedback would be one of the best ways to improve the teachers’ teaching capacities as one of the vital steps of the process of professional development via a form of action research The negatives words which might indicate the downside of the course or the double negations used by Polish students in polite or emphasized ways of sharing information or judgments about the course were identified by locating the negative words such as “not”, “negative”, shouldn’t”, “boring”, “n’t”, and “useless” When these keywords were located in the cases of reflection, the semantics analyzing would be applied to understand what students really meant about these used negative words From extracting the sentences or phrases including the negatives words from 96 cases of students’ reflections and from the previous word count, 162 negative words were found in 140 extracts which were collected for analysis There were cases that some negative words appeared in the same sentences or some cases with many sentences using a negative word in each These extracts were later analyzed and the findings from analyzing negative awareness could be classified into (1) general messages from the extracts with negative words and (2) real drawbacks of the course, of which the double negations as a way of confirming the success of the lessons would not be analyzed in details in this paper However, the extracts from locating the negative words would not indicate that the messages or implied meanings would be a negation language phenomena plus meaning at & above the sentence levels DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0010.4978 Vol 4, No 1, 2017, pp 16-26 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) This paper will present how the negative signals from students’ reflections are grouped and analyzed using different techniques involving both qualitative and quantitative analysis For the negative signals, the data from students’ reflections were analyzed by the application of discourse analysis3 It was done simply from the surface levels of words in the reflections before checking the issues of semantics using the unfolding matrix (Padilla, 1994) Since the purposes of learning from student reflections mainly for the modifications to teach better in the next step, all the cases with negative signals were carefully located, counted, and analyzed (quantitative analysis section) All the words within the categories of negative awareness were used as a hint to locate the extracts containing them (qualitative analysis section) The found extracts which contain the negative words were analyzed using Atlas.ti to categorize into different codes and filter for quotations Although these quotations embedded the negative words, it could be classified into the cases of (1) a double negation, (2) a way of emphasis using negations, or (3) the real negative reflections Among these, the next step in my way of analysis was to focus on these real negative reflections to study the meanings of the extracts so to learn and plan for some modifications about the coming teaching courses 20 Duy Khang Nguyễn  •  Exploiting the values of negative feedback from students’ reflections as an innovative approach for pedagogical General messages from the extracts with negative words This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Outputs from analyzing extracts with negative words using Atlas.ti were categorized into the following codes These codes of 172 quotations were categorized from 140 extracts of 96 cases of students’ reflections with recognition of negative words Analyzing the data of extracts with codes was aimed to check for negative ideas about the course or my teaching The findings were interesting that 27 quotations related to the code of “ideas should be notices for next courses” as the feedbacks of problems or drawbacks from the course that the teacher, or myself, might learn and pay attention to what should be improved or modified as an important step in my action research The ideas from these negative but valuable ideas of students would be useful to identify the problems and put some alerts to the ways of teaching or the contents that should be prepared for other courses Besides looking at the real negative feedbacks as the signals of professional development for my career and in this teaching process, the quotations were found from different codes which showed that students were learning and changing their ways of thinking about teaching and learning in the research context The summary of these codes could be viewed as in the following chart Figure Distributions of quotations for the codes of the extracts using negative words Chart (Fig 1) displayed higher percentage in codes of “changing perceptions towards teaching and learning” and “differences regarding the reality of teaching and learning” It would not be enough for an overgeneralized case but students reflected that the course changed their perceptions about the job and that it was different from what they have learned on a daily basis with 39 quotations Although each extract must consist of a “negative signal”, the quotes indicated that the frequencies of comparing to other common courses that this course was not for them to only sit, listen, and write Random selections of a few quotations were as follows: It is similar to a creative workshop in practice style but it’s not as other courses as in Spain where you only go to class, sit, listen to the teacher and learn it off by heart to just write it in the exam and then forget it [SRN2] We had many chances to real work, not just write, and listen [SRN5] It was demanding course, we have not been sitting and doing nothing Every lesson we made projects in group or individual I was not expecting that, for me, it was little challenge to understand what you (teachers) say because of different in accent [SRN9] Or they showed that they had to be active even that they were familiar with being quiet and shy in other classes You made that now people are not afraid to judge and express their opinions Each of us had to engage in these activities I think that this course was useful [SRN11] We are not only listeners, we are part of this course, we are active and we can show our ideas [SRN41] DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0010.4978 Vol 4, No 1, 2017, pp 16-26 Duy Khang Nguyễn  •  Exploiting the values of negative feedback from students’ reflections as an innovative approach for pedagogical 21 Sometimes it was hard to me be active in this course and participate in activities because I am not used to be taught in that way [SRN48] In the class would be shy students that not talking very much and not active in other lessons, But in this lesson, everyone needs to talk and be active [SRN56] In most cases, students reflected that they studied something meaningful, useful and practical for their future career in a new interesting way Unexpectedly we were doing a lot of exercises playing and talking, not only sitting and listening I expected that it will be boring but it turned out very interesting because of the big amount of new information that I have learned and because of the way of learning all these things [SRN31] I am certain that I learned much more from the course than from common lectures which flood us with [many] much useless information [SRN87] Figure Network 1: Relations of codes regarding extracts from students’ reflections with negative words This network showed that the contradictions among the quotes should be noticed for my learning or for the next course in accordance with elements from students regarding their perception changes and comparisons with the reality of teaching and learning In order to clarify the important roles of learning from students’ reflection, the following findings would be found from the quotes which were coded for the ideas that need to be noticed The following 27 quotes were collected from 21 cases of students’ reflections because some students reflected more than one problem or ideas with negative signals No matter how good the lessons were given and how interesting they were, the least 21.8% of cases (21 out of 96) were recognized with the negative feedbacks or implications for problems although almost all overall evaluation of the course and the teaching DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0010.4978 Vol 4, No 1, 2017, pp 16-26 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) The lessons from learning the students’ reflections were meaningful and important for this study and for the author’s personal professional development Learning from feedbacks was one of the habits during my teaching career and here in Poland as it was kept during the action research In reality, I focused on what they really disappointed about it However, the negative words may not lead to all negative messages Atlas.ti was applied to quote and separate the different categories as described above and to identify the specific quotes for the drawbacks which should be concerned as could be seen as the following network data 22 Duy Khang Nguyễn  •  Exploiting the values of negative feedback from students’ reflections as an innovative approach for pedagogical were good If I did not use the linguistic analysis before looking at the data, I would miss some of their minor concerns about the weaknesses of the course or my teaching It was sometimes impossible for the teachers to identify the problems if they read students’ reflections like reading the exams because the general evaluation and good words were used in larger scales Therefore, the findings from the attempt to look at negative sides would be a good signal to alternate the future plans and teaching for better students’ significant learning When the teachers were open enough and students’ ideas were assumed to be listened to, they would give more concentrations on both good and bad sides of the class Drawbacks of the course from students’ reflections From these 27 quotes and some extracts found negatives during the analysis of all cases into Fink’s taxonomy using the method of Padilla (1994) for qualitative data analysis, problems were found regarding the effectiveness lessons although these students’ ideas might contradict to their own ideas and most other students However, the goals of analyzing these problems were contributed to the next step of the whole process for one of the action research circles so that learning from students, their feedback, improve professional skills, alternate teaching, and continue doing research This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Problem 1: Difficult to understand my English When realizing that students reflected about their difficulties to understand my English, I paid attention to this matter in the later course and made sure that students would have no problems understand my lessons As could be seen in SRN4, SRN9, SRN21, SRN91, SRN30, SRN48, SRN69 and SRN15b (8.3% cases) that students had their reasons for something unclear from the course because of the language issue The reasons that limited their understanding could be listed as my accent, different in pronunciation, and not familiar with English environment It was demanding course, we have not been sitting and doing nothing Every lesson we made projects in group or individual I was not expecting that, for me, it was little challenge to understand what you (teachers) say because of different in accent [SRN9] I had sometimes problems to understand you because of your pronunciation, but mostly it was good so not worry (smiling face) I also like your enthusiasm in teaching [SRN21] The lessons were learned from these reflections which raised awareness for me – as a teacher – to add this issue to proceed the modifications in the next course Although students faced language problems because of the differences in my language capacity, some of them confirmed the reasons were from their nervousness or not enough practices because they got improvements after every meeting I am not used to speaking in English, so as a result I sometimes feel nervous when I have to speak [SRN4] At first, I did not understand you and some of your points but then it was getting better with every next Wednesday [SRN30] Some advice was also suggested in their reflections that I should speak slowly and check frequently if the messages were clear These suggestions were taken as modifications for other courses But in my personal opinion when teachers teach a student in language which is the second language for teacher and also for students, the teacher should talk slower and really check if the student understands For me sometimes comments were incomprehensible for example because of accent It was hard to understand what to it But only sometimes, Most of the time was clear [SRN48] The feedback in this section indicated that no matter how good or bad my English is the matter of understanding during the class should be also stressed In fact, each problem contributed to my improvement process during this teaching which it added the notions to the further process and generated for my actions to better facilitate students’ significant learning DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0010.4978 Vol 4, No 1, 2017, pp 16-26 Duy Khang Nguyễn  •  Exploiting the values of negative feedback from students’ reflections as an innovative approach for pedagogical 23 Problem 2: Understand the lessons different from my expectations It would be meaningless for any teaching that the teachers taught what they wanted and did not spend any chances to check if students understood and were able to be more competent from the lessons I would value any signals that students seemed to understand the courses different from what they were supposed to be trained (SRN15a, SRN40, SRN56, SRN61, SRN71, and SRN83) Collecting these different ways of understandings about my lessons would help me check the possibilities of my part and students’ part at the same time The following perceptions were not exactly what I supposed to share with students Sometimes with many ideas in my head, I can be not prepared to the lesson and it will be still good and interested [SRN15a] Another thing is that you can have a lesson even if you did not prepare anything [SRN40] I found out a lot of practical things such as controlling the class, catching students’ attention and what I can when I am not prepared before a new class [SRN83] The notion of “lessons from nothing” were a collection of techniques in teaching English that any teachers could use and apply in case of the first day in the course when both students and the teachers did not know each other before and in some cases that the teachers had to immediately run an activity that did not link to any lessons but could help students practice their English However, some students understood that they could go to class and teach interesting lessons without any preparation which would be opposite to any theories of didactics and regulations in teaching I would take this as a problem to my teaching for future teaching or as an alert of its clarification so that I could make sure students in later courses understand the meaning of “lessons from nothing” properly I remembered in my lessons that students should be more important in any teaching and they could learn better with the diversities of activities including games and interesting ways to discover the core of what they learned But what they took was related to only “learning through play” and “memorizing” It is different from the other courses because we are needed to act as a real teacher and we can see what sort of things we have to correct, to not make these mistakes in front of our future students [SRN61] Of course, making mistakes would not be encouraged by any teachers However, nobody was perfect and teaching required the teachers to know not only the knowledge or their expertise but many other things associating to the effective of one or some lessons The activity of sharing with students about the notions of making mistakes, types of mistakes, and these situations should be careful and the matter should be dealt with during the class time It should be noted in my self-reflective tools for further improvement Teaching required the teachers with a lot of skills, not only classroom management Preparation for teaching was also important and it helped the teachers a lot in the process of managing the class in many unexpected situations No mistakes should be made but the world technology was changing too fast and many aspects of knowledge were modified since then It was not the problem with making mistakes but the attitudes to deal with mistakes and how to confirm what should be the options for any questions In this current world, one question would never have only one answer as it used to be Problem 3: Workload or demanding course When the analysis moved into the extracts related to negative points from students’ reflections, some of them were coded to be related to the workload from the course in which it was very demanding with a lot of requirements Although only extracts (about 5.2%) were found regarding this problem, it alerted me to check if the course was too demanding or not I think that sometimes is needed to work a lot, be well prepared but I also think that not always it have to be.[SRN48] Sometimes you demanded too much but generally I liked this course in 90% [SRN30] DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0010.4978 Vol 4, No 1, 2017, pp 16-26 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) I have learned that really important to teach children through play, not just by memorizing [SRN56] 24 Duy Khang Nguyễn  •  Exploiting the values of negative feedback from students’ reflections as an innovative approach for pedagogical I have to work a lot with my group lesson and individual activity but it was worth because I have to work a lot with my group lesson and individual activity but it was worth because I could see my mistakes and try not to them again [SRN76] Straight we not have to a lot of things [SRN14] I didn’t suppose that we will so many activities and projects But I think it’s better than listen teacher one and half hour [SRN65] I had to admit that the course involved students in doing many activities that they needed to practice or did something to learn the skills of classroom management In only 15 hours for each course, many parts of the knowledge were introduced shortly and sent to students for self-learning Most of the time was used for analyzing the problems and solutions with managing the class in which they practiced to learn It was a demanding course but not an overloaded one The first courses were accomplished with all lessons and requirements so this problem would not be transferred to be part of my modification but as a note for my own reflective experiences The matter could be easily solved if students were more familiar with learning by doing than just listening as they are used to Problem 4: Students’ learning styles When students classified themselves to be “shy”, I would understand that they were not able to be active If that happened, the course with the core of active learning by doing would not be effective for them This was a notion found during my teaching so I did some modifications to fix this problem so that they became active in my classes I believed that being the teachers required us to be active first and had an open mind This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Actually, I think it was ok but we are quite shy and are not accustomed to this form of expression [SRN30] It was hard for me to not distract when someone is talking and I have something to say, what is important in working with kids because they always have something to say [SRN61] When students complained that they did not like to give an assessment to their friends’ activities which they thought it was about to evaluate “other students”, it was not appropriate and this notion became a reason for my other big modifications to the course described in section I did not like to assessment other students because we were more focused on this instead on their activities [SRN35b] It would not be normal and easy to change students’ learning habits of passiveness However, my beliefs about teaching and enthusiasms were the only things that I would use to help students have a better vision about the job in terms of classroom management skills Regardless the ordinary learning styles or habits, an attempt was conducted to encourage students to discuss with me what they would like to learn and they were also guided to achieve the skills they needed for the course by various ways of didactical processes Problem 5: The course setting This problem was totally about the things that I could not modify in my teaching when they complained that the course was too short for them They learned practical and valuable things for their future but it was in limited time Unfortunately for me, this course is too short to show students every [advantages] of good exercises and disadvantages of not developing exercises This course was as I [was] expected It was a good experience for me to see so many developing exercises and so many ideas of my friends I have to work a lot because I learned a lot Now I know what I did bad and what was good in my ideas of activity [SRN71] In my opinion, the course should last longer so all of the students could have more time to their activities (not only minutes) That way we could share our ideas more and learn more from each other [SRN90] This problem was noticed for modifications with some ideas to provide students with what they also needed after the course However, it was not the only issue regarding the course setting They also complained about the schedules that they had to study without a long break DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0010.4978 Vol 4, No 1, 2017, pp 16-26 Duy Khang Nguyễn  •  Exploiting the values of negative feedback from students’ reflections as an innovative approach for pedagogical 25 I think that we weren’t too active on these classes because after our lectures and it was too late hour without a longer break So until we even started classes we were tired of our previous one Other things were fine and I’d like them, especially activities, yours and our classmates [SRN36] I think they tried to explain the cases that they became passive sometimes during the course that I realized and changed my ways of teaching so that they had to revive again Though it was not so much related to the course setting, the passive learning habits made them blame their laziness on the inappropriate schedule from the school No big modifications regarding this problem would be made but it was an important notification about the appropriateness for learning at some points Problem 6: Students’ fairness awareness Although not many students reflected about this problem, their ideas regarding fairness when their friends assessed their performances were discussed during the course It was the matter of not trusting their friends’ assessment and the wishes of having equality in everything, even the scores that I would never give them all the same number They reminded me that I would be fair with how they would be evaluated as that my course plan and that meant what criteria using for the course assessment should be more obvious and understandable for Polish students But sometimes not everyone was putting enough attention for others presentation, what could end an unfair opinion [SRN16] Problem 7: Unclear instructions or being absence for the first day It was hard to comprehend the problem regarding the following reflections about unclear instructions from my teaching However, with the sense of being open to more options that no matter how hard I cared about students learning and the instructions to make sure every student obtain the lessons, some students still got problems with it The truth is that when I started the course I was not sure about what was going on, but now, I can say that this was really interesting and in addition, working with my classmates helped me to acquire new and different ideas that I will use in the future [SRN62] Although the moment of unsure about my instructions occurred at the beginning of the course, this student’ reflection was also important for me to a modification to better students’ learning In short, it could be assumed that the extracts related to the drawbacks were categorized into these problems Each problem or issue related the course was the evidence for me or any teacher to learn and improve teaching A series of actions were done to modify the ways my courses were organized so that students would be provided with significant learning The modifications to fix these problems were aimed to improve the quality of the course and that also illustrated the personal ways of looking at students’ reflections after the course Their reflective feedback which was analyzed for problems of my teaching would become one of the vital sources of information and ideas for the sake of self-modification regarding professional development Conclusions Although one research case is not significant enough for an overgeneralization, it is possible to conclude that the negative signals from students’ reflections have raised a lot of awareness in the research context regarding the teacher’ teaching, the quality of the course, and students’ learning As earlier stated, the paper was extracted from a 3-year-research plan in which analyzing the values of negative feedback from students’ reflections was one of the steps further in the process of pedagogical professional development The lessons from exploiting the values of negative feedback are relevant to the contemporary pedagogical focuses not on teaching, but on DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0010.4978 Vol 4, No 1, 2017, pp 16-26 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) I think the roots of this problem might be partly from the unclear rubrics or evaluation criteria about students’ final results as long as they learned in the system They were alien to my methods of subjective assessment that I used different scales of competencies for each criterion to evaluate their learning process, projects, and final papers Of course, the problem of attention was noticed for some modifications regarding my treatments of using evaluation sheets during the time their friends’ performances 26 Duy Khang Nguyễn  •  Exploiting the values of negative feedback from students’ reflections as an innovative approach for pedagogical students and the process of learning in which caring about what the teachers should improve from different perspectives relevant to non-teachers’ subjectivity in education If these negative signals of the “minorities” among the good sides could not be found from students’ reflection about one’s course or teaching, the teachers have missed a lot of chances to identify values and good advice from students If teaching is an endless professional process of any teachers, the values of students’ negative feedback are really important in the pedagogical development This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) References Adcroft, A (2011) The mythology of feedback Higher Education Research & Development, 30(4), 405-419, DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2010.526096 Carless, D (2006) Differing 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