More than Criticism: Feedback Strategies that Lead to Independent Learning

It’s a balance that even experienced educators struggle to find—how to give feedback that motivates students to take responsibility for learning, without leaving them adrift. 

A study published in 2023 suggests one concrete approach that can help students embrace self-sufficiency. “In what we call agentic feedback, teachers provide opportunities for students to independently revise their work,” one of the researchers, behavioral scientist Camilla Griffiths, writes in Scientific American. “It’s the difference between telling someone how they should do it and asking, ‘How could you ap­­proach this issue differently in the future?’”

Researchers asked middle and high school students to review samples of teacher feedback and rate how much choice it provided, how much work it created, and how they would feel if they received that criticism for their own writing assignment. The results reveal that students prefer being given more independence—even if it means they have more revising to do.

“Our studies show that all students, and particularly Black students, see agentic feedback as communicating the teacher’s belief that they can improve their writing,” Griffiths writes. 

It’s an important finding, she adds, because “many Black students wonder whether their teacher believes in them and worry more about a teacher’s race-based negative expectations for them.”

COMMUNICATING RESPECT

Earlier research had explored the connections between teacher feedback and student outcomes. 

Two 2014 studies of seventh-grade students, led by the prominent social psychologist David Yeager, found that students’ motivation and work quality improved when a teacher’s feedback on their essay communicated high expectations and the teacher’s belief in the student’s potential to meet those standards.

In Yeager’s studies, the inclusion of the simple phrase “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them,” yielded dramatic results. Students submitted far more revisions and improved the quality of their final drafts.

Though praise shouldn’t be withheld from students, it isn’t necessarily part of productive feedback—and shouldn’t be forced, either. In fact, too much praise can actually backfire in the classroom, English education professor Todd Finley writes, degrading effort and trust between students and teachers.

Moreover, excessive approval doesn’t prepare students to take charge of their own learning, Griffiths argues.

“Although supportive language can complement agentic feedback, it should not be the only feedback given,” she writes in Scientific American. “Receiving only praise can be disempowering because it limits the potential for learning and growth.”

SETTING THE TONE

Matthew Johnson’s war on commas exemplifies two opposing approaches to student feedback. For a long time, Johnson took pains to circle every error in comma usage, but it was laborious and his students weren’t improving. Frustrated by the dead end, he created a special “comma paper”—an assignment designed specifically to help students master their use of the punctuation mark.

“The deep focus on commas leads to more student growth in one short paper than a year of circling and correcting commas ever did!” Johnson notes.

What Johnson discovered is true for many teachers. Feedback that places less emphasis on student accountability—for instance, papers with dozens of corrections marked in red ink or worksheets with the solutions provided for wrong answers—often results in less learning. 

“When I notice the same mistake again, I refrain from making yet another correction,” writes David Cutler, a history and journalism teacher in Massachusetts. “Instead, I highlight the sentence or passage and ask the student to think about what needs revision.”

Teachers may think they’re helping students when they rewrite a thesis sentence to sharpen the argument or edit a sloppily constructed sentence. But Cutler argues that asking students to revise independently is better because it communicates his “faith in them to address the problem…and gives them more responsibility for their learning.” 

It’s an insight backed by recent research that observed 175 eighth graders and their teachers as they prepared for a high-stakes algebra exam. The study concluded that learning from errors was particularly effective when teachers asked more questions and shifted the responsibility for solutions to the students.

In fact, the teachers whose students had the best final test scores asked lots of open-ended questions followed by student-centered discussion, like: “Okay, you guys got this wrong? Why would somebody get this wrong?” Janet Metcalfe, a psychologist at Columbia University who led the study, told The Hechinger Report. They did very little lecturing.

To bring this practice into your classroom, resist providing answers and substitute feedback like “Can you try rewriting this topic sentence to reflect your paragraph?” or “Where might you look to find resources to address this issue?” It’s an approach to revision that “signals trust that the student can master this skill,” Griffiths concludes in Scientific American.

INCORPORATING PEER-TO-PEER FEEDBACK

When you help your students learn how to give constructive feedback to each other, they build skills they can use to independently assess and improve their own work. Peer-to-peer feedback also gives kids an equal and accountable role in learning outcomes, which makes them “feel more seen, heard, valued, and, consequently, engaged in their work,” according to Jamie Kobs, a longtime high school English teacher who now works for Wisconsin Literacy.

But first, it’s important to build a culture of feedback in class. This helps students who struggle with peer feedback because they’re sensitive to criticism, on the one hand, or may be hesitant to offend a peer, on the other. To encourage a culture of tolerance towards feedback, try incorporating peer critique into all kinds of class work and emphasize reflection over correction by giving students the “I like, I wish, I wonder…” framework. 

When High School English teacher Mark Gardner introduces peer feedback to his students, he starts by defining effective feedback and offering examples of the kinds of open-ended feedback that leads to productive revision. Gardner specifically discourages his students from correcting syntax errors. “I direct my students to reflect upon each other’s work—not correct it,” he writes. “My students focus on idea development, clarity, and arrangement to make sense of the writer’s text.”

Similarly, Kobs provides sentence starters to help her students deliver peer feedback that leads to high quality, independent revision. Her starters include prompts like “I didn’t get the part about...,” as well as questions and suggestions that are open-ended and rooted in curiosity, like “What happened next?” or “Maybe you can try….”

Educator Dr. Catlin Tucker offers her students six prompts and asks them to choose two to guide their feedback. Some of the prompts focus on celebrating a writer’s strengths (“Identify the strongest aspect of this draft. What specifically was strong?”) while others help address confusion, missing elements (“Identify a part of the draft that needs more information. What would you have enjoyed knowing more about or having more information on?”), and even minor adjustments.

TRACKING THEIR OWN PROGRESS 

At the New Mexico School for the Arts (NMSA), self-assessment is key to the school’s mission to create independent learners though a four-step process: 

1. Expose students to examples of excellence
2. Expand academic vocabulary to support reflection and analysis
3. Practice giving feedback
4. Apply analysis skills to self-assessment

At NMSA, teachers share their own work, as well as exemplary work from outside experts and more advanced students. To familiarize students with vocabulary specific to their craft, try posting words or phrases like “You broke the moment” (drama department); canon, plié, and tendu (dance); or story arc, plot, setting, and character development (writing) on classroom walls, and review key terms—or particularly effective examples of feedback—regularly with your students. 

"My goal as a teacher is to get students to a place by 11th grade where they can visualize what needs to adjust and be their own editor,” says Karina Hean, chair of NMSA's visual arts department. “Until they can do that, they're always going to rely on outside voices, which isn't bad in and of itself, but you often need to be your own problem solver."

Middle school social studies teacher Erin Merrill, meanwhile, has her students independently track their own progress meeting different learning standards in a four-page data notebook—for example, understanding the difference between primary and secondary sources, or defending perspectives through writing, discussions, and debate. One year, that approach delivered a 100 percent pass rate on the year-end state standardized assessment, she says. Moreover, Merrill’s students found the process helpful: “They like having that visual of how they’re doing, especially growing over the course of the year,” she told Education Week.

Nina Parrish, a former special education teacher in Virginia, also has her students use a notebook to track their progress throughout the year—but her students focus on documenting effective and ineffective strategies they tried in their work. “Students benefit from trying multiple ways to learn and practice a specific skill,” she writes, “so that they can discover what works best for them in different contexts.”

Ultimately, Parrish has her students write their own practice tests and test questions—an activity aimed at helping students identify key concepts, understand what they know and don’t know, and think through what they can do differently in the future.

“Students who develop their metacognitive skills may begin to think about learning differently,” Parrish notes. “Instead of viewing learning as teacher-dependent, they may start to understand that learning is something they have the tools to do on their own…and become leaders in their own learning process.”

TAKING THE STING OUT OF HARD FEEDBACK 

Some students experience strong emotions when teachers or peers critique their work—and the anxiety can undermine self-confidence and interfere with a student’s ability to understand and apply the feedback they receive, according to U.K.-based researcher Dr. Naomi Winstone.

It’s a problem Elizabeth Matlick encountered while teaching English and writing to middle and high school students near Seattle. “I still had learners who didn’t do much with all the feedback they received,” Matlick writes in EdSurge. “Faster, more targeted feedback solved only part of the problem.”

To address that problem, she applied Winstone’s ideas about feedback and added a few steps to lay the groundwork before giving students her feedback. 

First Mattlick asked her students to write how they feel when they receive feedback in one word on a post-it note. Students used words like “embarrassed” or “worried” or “resentful.” “The conversation was eye-opening,” she notes. “I realized that I had no idea how my students felt about feedback.”

Next Matlick asked her students to brainstorm ways of managing their emotions during feedback with “if...then...actually” statements like: “If I’m scared, then I might not even look at my feedback. Actually I can look at my feedback in private and wait a day to respond.”

Then they role-played giving and receiving feedback in pairs, with one student pretending to be learning to drive and the other a driving instructor. During the exercise Mattlick asked her students to consider how they could handle feeling scared as a student driver (i.e., the recipient of coaching and feedback), how the student could communicate their feelings to the driving teacher (i.e., the feedback giver), and what could happen in the absence of that communication.

It’s an approach Matlick borrowed from researcher Victoria Black, whose 2018 study offers insight on how to respond to feedback with agency. Students reported feeling more in control of how they received and implemented feedback.

“The goal is for my students to eventually develop the patience needed to persist through multiple rounds of feedback, to have the motivation to improve even when the process feels stressful, and to bring a curiosity about how to learn more deeply, rather than focusing on a letter or number grade,” Matlick concludes.