Structuring Feedback for Growth: a Mentor's Guide

*Please note: this webinar is for Orthopaedic Division Mentors only

Description

Effective mentorship depends on meaningful, well‐structured formative feedback. This 50‐minute webinar introduces mentors to simple, evidence‐based approaches for creating more engaging, supportive, and productive feedback conversations. Drawing on current research in higher education and health professional training, this session explores practical models such as dialogic feedback, feedforward strategies, and structured frameworks that promote mentee growth and self‐regulation. Participants will learn how to create psychologically safer feedback environments, how to co‐construct action steps with mentees, and how to adapt feedback practices to real‐world and culturally diverse learning settings. This session blends short instructional segments with small‐group breakout practice, ensuring mentors leave with tools they can immediately apply.

For those who attended the Instructor Workshop in Kelowna 2025 –‘Creating a culture of Feedback:
This webinar will be a next step, a practical extension that takes the theory of feedback culture and shows how to use it in mentorship conversations.
For those who did not:
This webinar functions as a self‐contained, accessible, skills‐focused session, providing models, language, and tools needed to deliver high‐quality formative feedback in a variety of mentorship contexts.

Price:

• Free for Orthopaedic Division Mentors

Webinar Details:

• Date: April 29, 2027
• Time: 7:00pm EST

Presenter: Melanie MacKinnon

Melanie MacKinnon is a practicing physiotherapist with over 20 years of clinical experience, a multidisciplinary clinic owner, and an Assistant Professor-Teaching Stream, at the University of Toronto. She co-leads the Advanced Musculoskeletal Unit and teaches transition-to-practice topics such as the new graduate mindset, aligning professional values with work, employment models, and contract considerations. Melanie also leads the Founders Selective, which focuses on leadership and entrepreneurship in healthcare.

Her academic journey began with a degree in Kinesiology from Dalhousie University, followed by a Master of Science in Physical Therapy at the University of Toronto. She later completed a Master’s in Clinical Science Manipulative Therapy at Western University and became a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Manual and Manipulative Physiotherapists (FCAMPT) in 2009.

Melanie is passionate about education and mentorship across the full continuum of professional development from pre-licensure training to advanced post-licensure practice. She teaches and mentors within Canada’s National Orthopaedic Division’s Advanced Integrated Manual Therapy program and Western University’s Advanced Health Care Practice Graduate Program. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD in Health Professional Education Research, exploring how assessments can integrate technical skills with social and humanistic elements of practice to better prepare clinicians for real-world care. Her research emphasizes critically reflective practice, examining personal and societal assumptions and power relations that shape professional behavior. By fostering critical reflection that leads to action, she aims to help future clinicians challenge biases and systemic inequities, ultimately preparing them to deliver care that is both clinically competent and socially responsive.