Clinical teachers’ teaching self-efficacy after instructional skills workshops: only some improvements are associated with feedback experience — a two-cohort study

Background The Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW) develops clinical teachers’ teaching competence through repeated cycles of microteaching, peer and facilitator feedback, and re-practice. Most studies, however, treat training effects as a single global outcome, rarely asking whether gains are uniform across dimensions or which training experiences accompany them. This exploratory study examined whether an ISW-based programme improved clinical teachers’ teaching self-efficacy and whether gains in different dimensions differed in their association with feedback experience. Methods A single-group pre–post design was implemented in two annual cohorts of core clinical teachers (2022, N = 37; 2024, N = 39), the second serving as a temporal replication. Teaching self-efficacy was measured with a 12-item TSES-adapted questionnaire covering student engagement (SE), instructional strategies (IS) and classroom management (CM); feedback experience with a 30-item AEQ-adapted questionnaire covering five dimensions. Paired t -tests and Cohen’s d z assessed pre–post change, and Pearson correlations examined associations between feedback experience and self-efficacy gain scores (Δ). No correction for multiple comparisons was applied; cross-cohort replication served as the primary basis for credibility. Results All three dimensions improved significantly in both cohorts (all p < .001; 2022 d z = 1.20–1.75; 2024 d z = 1.42–1.54); all effects were large, though their relative magnitude across dimensions varied. The association with feedback experience showed a replicated divergence: gains in IS correlated significantly with what learners do with feedback, whereas gains in CM showed no significant association with any feedback dimension in either cohort (highest r = .27 and 0.18, respectively). Given limited statistical power, this should be read as a failure to detect an association rather than evidence of none. Conclusions Across both independent cohorts, clinical teachers’ teaching self-efficacy was higher after this ISW-based programme in all three dimensions, with large, replicated effect sizes. However, not all improvements were associated with feedback experience: gains in classroom-management efficacy showed no association with any feedback dimension in either cohort and may therefore have other sources. This divergence suggests that feedback should not be presumed to be a single unifying mechanism driving gains across all dimensions, a hypothesis warranting further investigation.