There is currently no formalised peer-to-peer (P2P) feedback mechanism for academic staff within the BA Product and Industrial Design course at Central Saint Martins. This absence is symptomatic of a wider institutional gap where structured, inclusive and dialogic feedback is often confined to hierarchical line management structures, such as Planning and Review Conversations (PRCs)[1][2]. This report outlines the theoretical grounding and design rationale for a staff-focused P2P feedback toolkit aimed at addressing these gaps through inclusive, regenerative, and participatory practices.
The toolkit aims to support staff in articulating and receiving feedback, advice or help aligned with their Personal Development Goals (PDGs). It reframes feedback not as evaluation or performance review, but as a collaborative and reciprocal learning practice. The toolkit seeks to operationalise these practices by creating synergies and informative feedback loops within existing systems, such as PRCs for staff and Personal Academic Tutorials (PATs) for students. This report examines key literature, analyses institutional precedents, and outlines a participatory design research strategy to support future development.
1.0. Problem Context: Professional Development, Recognition and Feedback Culture at UAL
Current PRCs at UAL are structured around one-per-term, one-to-one meetings with line managers, documented using standardised templates. While these tools aim to support professional growth, feedback from staff suggests they are often viewed as inconsistent, performative and insufficiently developmental.
Making Connections (Grimaldi et al., 2025, forthcoming) is a UAL-sponsored service design review of UAL’s decision-making processes and support of staff voice mechanisms in the context of EDI and climate action. A consistent finding from staff was both a felt and observed lack of recognition and support from the university, especially around social purpose work: “I think there’s almost a fear amongst staff of spending quality time on [EDI and social purpose initiatives] anymore, because they’re so worried that it will look like you’re not doing your job well enough, or that you’re spending too much time on things where we can’t see a result. Actually, there is a result – it’s just that a culture shift, an attitudinal shift, is harder to measure.” (Interview quote from a UAL Academic member of staff for the Making Connections project, 2025). In addition, a lack of recognition can leave people feeling undervalued, but small actions can have a large impact on well-being and belonging: “Just encouraging people and listening to people. It’s sometimes a very small thing that will make a difference – celebrating people. Saying thank you when somebody has contributed.” (Interview quote from a UAL Academic member of staff for the Making Connections project, 2025).
Such feedback reflects a broader culture of defensiveness, and opacity around personal development and feedback. Without mechanisms for strengths-based dialogue, many staff are left without the tools to share pedagogical insight, recognise contributions or collaboratively reflect on development. The P2P regenerative leadership toolkit seeks to address this systemic gap by creating accessible structures for relational, non-hierarchical feedback that affirms individual growth and supports a shared learning culture.
2.0. Theoretical Foundations: Regenerative Leadership, Intersectionality and Praxis
Hutchins (2019) and Mark and Vangelova (2022) articulate regenerative leadership as a practice grounded in living systems, interdependence, and ecological thinking. Rather than positioning leadership in terms of control or hierarchy, regenerative approaches foster self-awareness, trust, growth and social sustainability. This aligns closely with the goals of the P2P feedback intervention in cultivating cultures of care, co-creation, and distributed agency within and across academic teams.
Mark and Vangelova (2022) observe that regenerative leaders “create a culture of trust that allows people to speak openly and vulnerably,” helping to reduce structural barriers to wellbeing. Moreover, they note that when organisations “actively encourage people to contribute knowledge from their diverse stories,” they create the conditions for deeper collaboration and capacity building. These insights are mirrored in early design principles of the proposed P2P feedback process including staff-led reflective prompts, inclusive feedback formats, and support for vulnerability and reciprocal learning.
Hutchins (2019) similarly critiques the “illusion of separation,” advocating for leadership that is relational and reflective. By drawing attention to human interconnectedness within institutions, Hutchins reframes leadership as a form of ecological stewardship. In the context of this intervention, the ecology being analysed is the academic environment. In the context of academic practice, the P2P toolkit thus becomes a regenerative intervention, supporting the design of living, adaptive pedagogical and learning systems in which individual and collective development are mutually reinforcing.
A core inclusive aspect within the toolkit and general P2P feedback process is its recognition of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991), and how complex identities have affected people’s relationships to academic learning, workplace cultures, support, feedback and critique. Experiences for many may be shaped by power, discrimination and historical marginalisation in academia and the workplace. An awareness to these potential experiences and perspectives, and how they may manifest – anxiety, fear, reluctance to speak openly, etc. – the toolkit and feedback processes aim to provide all staff with greater agency for how they engage in this kind of peer communication. For example, choosing modes (written or verbal), formats (bulleted or narrative), and delivery methods (direct or mediated). In addition, this P2P feedback process aims to promote the necessity of diverse experiences and knowledge exchange for collective growth and regeneration, by nurturing “conditions in which people can improve their competencies by learning from one another” (Mark and Vangelova, 2022).
Garrett (2024) further reinforces this imperative by illustrating how racism and racialisation in UK higher education not only shape the lived experiences but also the imagined futures of marginalised staff. As Garrett explains, “Racism is not simply an episodic experience, but a condition that continuously shapes the affective, professional, and imaginative dimensions of racialised minorities’ academic lives” (ibid). Designing feedback processes that aim to flatten systemic hierarchies, whilst centring agency, safety, recognition and reciprocity in the support of personal and professional growth can play a part in fostering belonging for all staff.
Lastly, Freire’s (1970) notion of praxis – the integration of reflection and action in the pursuit of transformation – provides a foundational perspective for the toolkit’s emphasis on dialogic feedback and critical pedagogy. By centring reciprocal engagement and the co-construction of knowledge, the approach aligns with Freirean aims to challenge hierarchies and empower participants as both learners and agents of change.
3.0. Framing Reflective Practice and Regenerative Feedback
The process of reflection forms the foundation for designing and engaging with the P2P feedback toolkit. Daudelin (1996) positions reflection as essential to learning from experience, particularly through stages that include articulation of a problem, examination of responses, and consideration of future actions. This model supports the idea that individuals must be given structured opportunities to reflect in order to grow meaningfully in professional settings.
Building on this, the 4-D cycle of Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider and Whitney, 2005) – Discovery, Dream, Design, Destiny – offers a generative alternative to deficit-based feedback models. These stages enable staff to reflect on what works well, envision aspirational goals, co-design next steps, and commit to sustaining progress. Although typically used in organisational development, this model offers a structure at the individual level in helping staff frame PDGs and shape their self-authored feedback questions.
Aligning with Daudelin (1996), and Cooperrider and Whitney (2005), Rolfe et al.’s (2001) reflective model structured around the questions “What? So what? Now what?”, offers a practical and widely used framework for reflective practice in educational contexts. The structure provides a scaffold for users to critically evaluate their experiences, draw meaningful insights and develop actionable next steps. Furthermore, it is important for reflective outputs emerging from this future feedback process to be actionable. Taken together, these frameworks reinforce the toolkit’s approach to support reflective self-authorship and encourage people to move from observation to insight to action.
Furthermore, the use of AI as a tool to support reflexivity offers avenues for experimentation. Yuan and Hu (2024) demonstrate how generative AI can enhance student reflection by prompting personalised questions, summarising journal entries, and adapting guidance based on learning goals. In the P2P toolkit, these affordances could support staff in drafting reflective questions, interpreting peer advice or formatting feedback in inclusive and accessible ways. AI is not a replacement for relational feedback, but rather a scaffold that can increase clarity, engagement, and cognitive flexibility.
4.0. Camden Council as a Precedent for Reflective Feedback Practice
The Camden Council Service Design team has implemented a P2P feedback system that offers useful precedents for this project. While their feedback practices emerged more organically from the cyclical peer feedback process and community of practice rather than from a deliberate and robust application of theory, their practices around feedback invite comparisons to qualities of regenerative workplace ecology, reflective learning and sustaining personal growth. Their approach includes staff writing their own development-focused questions and distributing them to colleagues they have recently worked with on projects. Responses can be written or delivered in person, and there is flexibility in how feedback is tracked (e.g., Miro, spreadsheets). Figures 1 and 2, are examples of how different Camden Council Service Design team members phrased personal feedback prompts, both choosing to collect information via a digital form.
(Figure 1: Example of Camden Council Service Design Team feedback prompts)
(Figure 2: Example of Camden Council Service Design Team feedback prompts)
Interviews with Camden team members reveal that framing questions around growth, for example, “I’m developing my workshop facilitation skills, do you have any advice?”, encourages helpful responses while reducing anxiety typically caused by the anticipation of critique. Though not formally modelled on Regenerative Leadership and Appreciative Inquiry, their approach exemplifies its core principles. Furthermore, Camden’s approach shows that informal feedback systems (e.g., personalised feedback trackers) can function well alongside existing review structures, provided staff are given choice, agency and the value of supportive tools have clear purpose and benefit.
5.0. System Integration Plan: PRCs and PATs
To ensure long-term efficacy and support, the toolkit should ideally integrate with existing institutional mechanisms at UAL. For staff, this includes the PRC cycle. Self-authored prompts centred on PDGs, developed through the toolkit, can feed directly into sections like “My Objectives and Priorities” or “How am I learning and growing?” on the PRC form. Peer feedback can serve as an informal complement to line-manager feedback, offering richer, contextual insight.
For students, especially in final-year contexts, the toolkit has future applicability within Personal Academic Tutorials (PATs). Students could develop PDG prompts and reflections related to confidence, studio skills, career planning, and receive advice from tutors and peers. This extends the principle of relational feedback to student development and supports the alignment of identity, goals and academic practice.
6.0. Design and Research Methodology: Participatory and Evidence-Driven
The P2P Feedback Toolkit for Regenerative Leadership will be developed using a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach (Reason & Bradbury, 2008), which values iterative co-design and learning. Key activities will include:
- Surveys across UAL to map existing formal/informal P2P feedback practices and identify gaps.
- Interviews with internal and external organisations about formal feedback processes to develop understanding and critical analysis of design precedents.
- UAL staff interviews to understand attitudes, needs and anxieties around feedback, and validate the project’s current assumptions about people’s relation to feedback in workplace cultures.
- Design probes and prototyping workshops involving iterative development and testing of PDG reflection templates, tools to help generate feedback prompts and P2P feedback delivery guides.
Over time, the project may incorporate digital tools like Miro and AI-supported tools to scaffold reflection, feedback, or track development. Applying AI as a reflexive and reflective tool, Yuan and Hu (2024) demonstrate how generative AI can enhance student reflection by prompting personalised questions, summarising journal entries, and adapting guidance based on learning goals. In the P2P toolkit, these affordances could support staff in examining pedagogical and other professional or practice-based experiences, drafting reflective questions, interpreting peer advice or formatting feedback in inclusive and accessible ways. AI is not a replacement for relational feedback, but rather a dialogic tool that can increase clarity, engagement and cognitive flexibility.
7.0. Intended Outcomes and Evaluation
The intended outcomes of this intervention are to improve staff experiences of feedback by fostering a greater sense of recognition, autonomy and development through peer-led dialogue. Second, to support conditions where reciprocal mentoring and diverse pedagogical contributions are embedded into the everyday practice of academic teams. Third, to generate a replicable framework that can inform future work on staff development and student-facing formative feedback processes. Evaluation will be conducted through qualitative follow-up interviews and short-form surveys, examining whether participants experienced greater acknowledgement, support, and advancement of their professional learning and development in light of their personal goals. The project will also assess how the toolkit influences their engagement with formal mechanisms like PRCs, and whether it contributes to stronger collegial trust and conviviality.
8.0. Identifying Risks and Limitations
This intervention acknowledges a set of practical risks. Time constraints, conflicting priorities, and emotional labour may affect staff willingness to participate in peer feedback activities. Others may feel cautious or ambivalent due to prior negative experiences of institutional feedback cultures. Embedding the toolkit in formal systems like PRCs may also face resistance if not institutionally endorsed. These limitations will inform the design research phase, particularly in how the toolkit scaffolds accessibility, emotional safety, and opt-in participation.
While generative AI can be used as dialogic tool for reflection, it also presents ethical and methodological concerns. Over-reliance on AI may inadvertently displace some benefits of peer interaction. From an environmental perspective, the training and deployment of large language models carries a high energy cost, contributing to carbon emissions (Scientific American, 2025). These concerns underscore the need to treat AI as an optional and critically mediated tool, not a replacement for relational practice but a supplementary aid embedded within regenerative and inclusive leadership values.
Conclusion and Forward Strategy
Theoretical frameworks from Regenerative Leadership to Appreciative Inquiry and Freire’s praxis provide a foundation for designing inclusive, peer-led feedback systems. The next phase will involve co-design, prototyping and broader institutional engagement. By fostering recognition and reflection as everyday leadership practices, the project aims to regenerate academic culture from within. Grounded by principles of regeneration, the goal is to diffuse leadership and mentorship amongst all staff or team members so that individual and collective development are mutually reinforcing.
Footnotes
[1] UAL’s Guidance for Planning and Review Conversations: https://canvas.arts.ac.uk/documents/sppreview/a083da86-f186-4e77-baf3-27da957f94be
[2] UAL’s My Planning and Review Conversations form: https://canvas.arts.ac.uk/documents/sppreview/a083da86-f186-4e77-baf3-27da957f94be and UALS
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