Conference Agenda

Across Europe, higher education programmes in the health professions are increasingly challenged to prepare graduates for uncertain, complex and rapidly changing professional contexts, which has led to a strong emphasis on graduate qualities such as adaptability, resilience and the capacity for reflection in and on action (Buchan et al., 2014). These qualities are particularly relevant for contemporary physiotherapy practice, where professionals must continuously navigate uncertainty and translate knowledge flexibly into practice (Biemans et al., 2024). Physiotherapy Advanced Collaborative Education (PACE) was developed as a research-informed educational concept to address these challenges by creating a comprehensive learning environment that supports students’ professional development (Stolwijk et al., 2025) and aligns with the ECER 2026 theme of putting research into action.

The PACE curriculum is organised as a flexible, competency-based programme in which students learn within communities of practice and follow individual learning paths across thematic periods. Students collect evidence of their professional development in portfolios and receive feedback to support their learning (Branzetti et al., 2023). The curriculum is organised according to the principles of programmatic assessment, integrating feedback, reflection and coaching as central elements of the curriculum (Schuwirth & Van der Vleuten, 2011).

Within PACE, teachers fulfil multiple roles, including subject matter expert, designer of learning environments and facilitator of meaningful interaction, all to avail student learning. Central to these roles is the provision of feedback, which students can use both to guide their development (formative function) and to demonstrate attainment of learning outcomes (summative function). In practice, however, the way feedback is designed and enacted by teachers strongly shapes how students engage with it, positioning teachers as key agents in determining whether feedback functions primarily as a learning resource or as evidence for assessment (Baartman et al., 2022). Research shows that teachers tend to provide mainly task‑level feedback, even though process feedback is far more powerful for developing adaptability, reflection and deep learning (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). Such higher‑level feedback supports a mastery rather than a performance goal orientation, an essential condition for learning in complex professional contexts. At the same time, teachers in the PACE programme feel overwhelmed by the high number of individual feedback requests and by the limited impact their feedback appears to have on students’ deep learning, a pattern mirrored in international research (Molloy et al., 2020). These challenges lead to a multidimensional research objective: how can students be supported to engage more productively with feedback, and how can teachers be enabled to facilitate this effectively.

Since teachers play a major role in shaping students’ uptake of feedback (Russell et al., 2022), it is essential that they develop the skills needed to create learning environments in which feedback is also used for learning (Stolwijk et al., 2025). Although knowledge about teacher feedback literacy is increasing (Boud & Dawson, 2023; Carless & Winstone, 2020), teachers still experience difficulties in accessing, interpreting and applying this evidence‑informed knowledge in their own contexts. To address this, teachers need actionable knowledge that helps them identify the causes of feedback challenges and develop a practical repertoire of strategies to address them (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2015).

Professional learning offers a promising way to develop such actionable knowledge. It supports teachers in strengthening their pedagogical expertise by designing and implementing professional experiments in their own classrooms and reflecting collaboratively on their outcomes within communities of practice (Mockler, 2024). Our research aims to promote a European dialogue on the potential of participatory design research as a method for professional learning. Therefore, the central research question of this investigation, is: How to support teachers’ professional learning to optimize the effectiveness and efficiency of teachers’ feedback practices?