Giving feedback on academic or behavioral issues can be stressful for both students and teachers. However, there are ways to make the process feel supportive and affirming. Feedback is most effective in environments that emphasize caring, not just obedience. In classrooms where educators foster unconditional positive regard, or valuing and accepting each student as worthy of respect and empathy regardless of their current behavior, performance, or circumstances, students feel supported and more comfortable in their learning.
What is feedback?
Feedback is an integral part of the metacognitive process and an essential skill to help our students become more independent and self-regulated learners.
Cognitive psychologists John Hattie and Greg Yates have identified several potential functions of feedback. Feedback can be:
- corrective in nature, focusing on the skill the student is learning.
- process-oriented, focusing on the strategies the student is using, or
- designed to help students transfer what they have learned in one setting to another, thereby becoming a more effective learner.
In each case, feedback is conversational and relies on asking questions and listening to students’ perspectives on academic and behavioral issues. It should motivate students to take action and give them a clear path forward by reminding them of:
- Where they are going and what their goals are.
- What progress they have made so far.
- How well they are doing on their current assignment.
- What needs to change.
- The next small step from where they are to where they want to be.
3 Keys to Providing Better Feedback
Avoid Empty Praise by Elaborating: One trap educators often fall into is giving praise when they try to provide feedback. Praise is not the same as positive feedback because it is usually vague, unactionable, and conditional. In fact, recent research suggests that empty praise can be harmful. When we praise students, they become less intrinsically motivated and develop a fixed mindset.
In contrast, positive feedback may begin with a positive comment, but elaborates on what the student did well. When providing feedback, teachers can also ask questions to help students reflect on or gain insight into their processes, strategies, or ideas. For example, “Your goal for this lesson was to learn to calculate the mean from the data in the table. In the prediction, you went from being unfamiliar with this skill to getting 7 out of 10 questions correct. This is marvelous progress! Can you show me how you solved the second problem? It looks like this problem was trickier than some of the others you tried.”
Then, when students show the steps of how they solved the incorrect problem, the teacher can have them compare it to the steps they took to solve the problem correctly. This can help students recognize mistakes. If students don’t know how to solve a problem that isn’t working correctly because they are different, the teacher will provide direct instruction on the necessary process, and students will correct the problems they missed as a way to practice the correct procedure.
Focus on the skill or process, not the person: When feedback is perceived as criticism, students may become defensive and unable to accept what the teacher says. Clinical psychologist Susan Heitler says, “Criticism is complaining; feedback is explaining.” Criticism isolates students by viewing them as a past or present problem, while feedback creates a team effort for students and teachers. Feedback is actionable, providing students with additional information, insight, or suggestions.
For example, if a student is late for class, a teacher might get frustrated that they missed an important warm-up before class and say, “You’re two minutes late again. Hurry up and sit down. Everyone else has already started.” This does not clearly convey the teacher’s actual intent, which is to worry about missing an important part of the lesson. Instead, the teacher could say, “Kerry, I’m glad you’re here!”
Once the other students have started working, or a few minutes after class has ended, find a time to speak to that student privately and say, “I noticed you were a few minutes late for class. Is everything okay? I’m concerned that you missed your warm-up. What can we do to fix this?”
Focus on the future: Feedback is future-oriented and optimistic. As educators, we give feedback with the positive intention of helping students improve because we see their potential and have a vision of what they can accomplish. After receiving feedback, students should be given time to reflect and revise their work or think about what they could do differently in the future.
In the academic example, where the student is finding the mean from the data set represented in the table, the student will use the process they have learned to correct their work. They will then explain to their teacher or classmates how they corrected their work to make sure they are on the right track. When they try a new problem on the same concept in the future, they now know the process for correctly solving the problem.
For the tardy student mentioned above, the teacher may find out that the student stopped in the restroom because that was the only time they needed to go. They can then use this information to help the student develop a plan to come in on time, complete their warm-up, and then go to the restroom for a break. After reviewing this plan together, students know what to do in the future to improve their performance in the classroom.
When teachers develop the ability for students to hear, understand, and receive effective feedback, they not only help students improve their academic skills, they also improve their behavior, motivation, and classroom engagement. The process of giving feedback, setting aside time for reflection, and creating a review plan gives students an important role in their own learning.