The ‘Reflective Elevator Pitch’
Dr Samuel Saunders
What is the idea?
A ‘Reflective Elevator Pitch’ is a short activity designed to act as either a formative or summative assessment, which requires students to consolidate a piece of work they have already completed and reformat it into a short, five-minute orally-delivered ‘pitch’ that summarises the work and identifies its key arguments, strengths, and discussion points. Rather than the traditional ‘elevator pitch’ that asks participants to think ahead to a new project that has potential but which has not yet been completed, a reflective elevator pitch asks participants to think about something they have already done and to reformat it into a new, easily digested dimension. This improves students’ understanding of the content, demonstrates (and enhances) their ability to reconceptualise it, and improves their capacity to reformat and deliver tailored material to specific audiences.
Why this idea?
A particularly contentious issue in assessment in UK higher education, despite extensive study in scholarly literature, is the construction and use of feedback (Winstone & Carless, 2019, p. xii). Both staff and students often find this difficult: on one hand, staff frequently feel frustrated with the fact that they are putting a great deal of time, effort and energy into something that students often simply dismiss, while on the other, students often contend that the feedback they receive on their hard-completed work is unhelpful, generic and irrelevant to future work (Henderson et al., 2019, p. 1237). Even within scholarly literature, there remains substantial disagreement regarding what actually constitutes ‘best practice’ in the feedback process; some feel that we should focus on the quality of feedback provided, others feel that we should focus on those involved in the process itself (namely staff and students), and still others feel that we should focus on the attributes that the feedback itself is designed to develop in the students (Henderson et al., 2019, p. 1237-1238).
However, since the early 2010s, discourse in academic literature has, at least, helpfully shifted towards a generally-accepted consensus that ‘feedback’ is an active process that can be ‘actioned’, rather than passively ‘received’, by students (Dawson et al, 2018, pp. 25-26). Both students and staff must therefore consciously engage with the feedback process if it is to truly make a positive difference: staff must provide students with feedback that both reflects on the completed work and links into a subsequent opportunity for its active re-use, so that students can demonstrate mastery of a concept, technique or idea post-feedback. Students, meanwhile, must engage with the feedback and actually account for it in their later work. A student-centred approach to feedback, such as that purported by David Carless and David Boud in 2018 in a study that explored students’ feedback literacy, is correct: for feedback to make a positive di