Evaluating the implementation of a research-informed tool for dialogic feedback in doctoral supervision

To enhance the benefits of feedback, we developed and introduced the Feedback Expectation Tool (FET). This tool promotes dialogue and fosters collaboration, ensuring optimal outcomes between supervisors and candidates. Between 2021 and 2022, we conducted 12 online workshops in 10 countries to introduce and evaluate the FET. Participants praised the FET for its communicative value, highlighting its benefits in enhancing pedagogy, fostering self-reflection, and clarifying expectations. We discovered that the FET could challenge supervisory relationships and cultures with significant power distances between supervisors and candidates. Challenges were raised regarding perceived ambiguities in the FET statements. We address these challenges by affirming that the FET is dynamic, allowing users to tailor it to their approaches, culture, traditions, and interpretations. Addressing these challenges could boost the FET’s capacity to promote collaborative learning, encouraging structured feedback in the global context of doctoral education.