Transformational Learning Principle
Guide—Elevate Reflection: Educators use a variety of data and tools to provide timely and specific feedback to students that helps them understand how to improve and encourages critical thinking. Students are given time and support to reflect on, learn from, and apply feedback. They monitor their own progress and set goals.
I think almost any teacher of any course, grade level, or discipline sees the value in elevating reflection for students. Reflection and feedback are valuable because they close the gap between instruction and student understanding. My father, the late education reformer Grant Wiggins, was fond of saying, “Just because you taught it doesn’t mean they learned it.” Embedding practices for feedback and reflection into our everyday teaching and assessment helps us ensure learning is, indeed, occurring.
Here are three practical ways teachers can tap into the power of feedback and reflection with students.
1. Revision-Based Assessment
As I’ve written before in Educational Leadership, designing a revision-based system of assessing student writing and presentations changed my life as a high school English teacher (Wiggins, 2022).
I developed a system of grading all writing and student presentations with a standards-based approach. I write the standards I want the students to reach in a single column on the left-hand side of my rubric. (See a sample rubric here.) Students achieve one of three designations for each standard: “Publishable” (for written work) or “Professional” (for presentation work); “Revisable;” or “Redo.”
In the final column of my rubric, I write specific feedback on why the student earned that criterion and how they can improve upon their assignment in revisions. Specific, actionable, and practical is the focus for these comments. Students can review that feedback and have unlimited opportunities to revise their work to get it to a “Publishable” standard (an A grade on a standard report card) if they wish.
Students’ response to this system has improved their understanding, skills, grades, and stress levels because they now have the autonomy to decide how far they want to take the revision process and balance it with their schedules and courseloads. This system was adopted more broadly by other English teachers at my school, and it has received overwhelming approval by teachers and students. About 98 percent of students say it’s the best assessment system they have ever experienced.
But the best part for me and my colleagues? Students actually read and incorporate our feedback because there is a timely, actionable way to use it to improve their grade. Students independently monitor their own progress and set goals. In this way, internalizing and applying feedback is incentivized. If students want to achieve at their highest levels, they need to apply the feedback from their teacher, often resulting in more dialogue with the teacher and better understanding of where they are and what they need to do next to reach or exceed the standard.
If students want to achieve at their highest levels, they need to apply the feedback from their teacher.
As many of us know, generative AI has made the writing teacher’s job incredibly difficult. In the age of ChatGPT, students can have a bot write their revision in seconds. So, a couple of years ago, my colleagues and I went back to the drawing board. We wanted to keep the spirit of revision-based assessment—allowing students to revise their work by using the targeted feedback we gave them—but we needed to make sure it was actually their work.
We adapted all our high school English courses to a model that we had already been using in our Advanced Placement English courses: allowing multiple attempts at writing essays in class, by hand (with laptops with locked-down browsers for our students with accommodations), and taking the best essay of several attempts instead of averaging all attempts.
In my current nonfiction course for 12th grade English, students must write three in-class synthesis essays using the nonfiction sources we’ve studied throughout the semester. The sources and the questions change with every essay, but the skills and the rubrics are the same. Each time, students get detailed feedback on a rubric, and they can use their feedback to improve the next essay. I use the best of those three essays for their grade.
While this “best of three” model may not be as effective as the revision-based assessment model from pre-AI days, it still honors the practice of reflection and allows students to improve through feedback. For teachers struggling with how to teach writing and revision effectively in the classroom since AI became mainstream, I recommend a handwritten, in-class writing approach, as it allows feedback with multiple attempts at revision while rewarding students for overall growth and ensuring their work is their own.
2. AI-Based Feedback
If you’re anything like me, the last couple of years have been challenging with the emergence of AI in the classroom. As an English teacher, I’ve used writing as a way for students to develop their critical thinking and to assess their understanding. However, with generative AI able to shortcut students’ ability to think and summarize their understanding, my colleagues and I have been hard-pressed to find assessments that truly assess students’ understanding and ability, not the bot’s (hence the handwritten, in-class writing assessments).
For those teachers who have access to approved, secure sources, AI can be a boon for reflection and feedback.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t begin to incorporate AI into our feedback practices—there are incredible uses for it to enhance student learning and growth. For those teachers who have access to approved, secure sources, AI can be a boon for reflection and feedback. Some of the tools currently available are very good at supplementing teacher feedback. One caveat: Make sure you consult your school or district’s policy on AI use, especially with students, before attempting any AI-driven feedback.
My school recently adopted Magic School, a web-based platform that allows us to use AI with our students in a way that is “sandboxed”—the data we enter is not being used to train the AI system, and we can also monitor students’ input and searches. One of my enterprising colleagues played around with Magic School’s “Writing Tutor” feature, which allows you to easily design a tutor bot that gives instant feedback to students on their writing using specific parameters, rubrics, and guidelines you set up ahead of time. My colleague experimented with his 8th grade English class by inputting an assignment sheet and rubric to the bot ahead of time, so the AI could give targeted feedback to each student based on those specific criteria. He also gave the AI tutor a few key details about our school’s writing program, such as that we use the Schaffer Paragraph Method and its terminology and asked it to ignore specific grammar or mechanical errors, since the focus of the lesson was on broader skills and drafting rather than polishing. During class time, my colleague had students type up their handwritten work into the Writing Tutor (set up beforehand) and ask it for specific feedback.
He reported positive results, so I wanted to give it a try in my own class to see what it really looked like in practice. First, I graded my senior nonfiction students’ first handwritten synthesis essay of the semester and gave them feedback. Then, I prepped the Writing Tutor in Magic School about specific types of feedback I wanted it to give my students, such as not worrying too much about grammar and rewarding deep thinking or unusual and sophisticated arguments.
Finally, I set aside class time for students to type their essays into Magic School and request feedback. The results were astonishing. While I’m a fan of traditional feedback methods and the human touch, my students and I were all surprised by how aligned the AI tutor’s feedback was with my feedback. In some cases, it went even further and gave some insights that I had overlooked in grading the essay. While I wouldn’t turn over my grading to a bot completely, by using this dual approach, students are getting two teachers for the price of one. (See an example of an essay reflection worksheet here.) As a bonus, they are also learning how to engage with AI in novel, productive, effective ways, something that is of growing importance for college and career readiness.
3. Student Surveys: Modeling How to Use Feedback
Finally, it’s important that we model how to receive and incorporate feedback from our students about our own practice. If we can’t model being open, welcome receivers of feedback, how can we justify giving feedback all the time to our students? There are many ways to do this, but my favorite way as a high school teacher is to give my students anonymous surveys every quarter and then share the results publicly with the class and talk through them.
The first time I tried this—truly anonymous, typed feedback that could not be traced back to any individual student—I wasn’t expecting some of the more pointed or detailed critiques. While I had a great rapport with that class and expected the feedback to be largely positive, there were comments that said it seemed like sometimes I played favorites, that we didn’t study enough grammar, that the reading load seemed overwhelming. While these weren’t unkind things, they stopped me in my tracks because I didn’t see them coming, and I would never have intuited that from the largely bright, eager crew I was teaching that year.
I realized that when given the chance to express anonymous feedback, students often provided valuable insights. Maybe I did play favorites and wasn’t aware of it. This caused me to reflect: How can I make every student feel like a favorite? And I started to teach more from that mindset; their feedback made me a better, more inclusive educator.
If we can’t model being open, welcome receivers of feedback, how can we justify giving feedback all the time to our students?
Now, almost two decades later, I always share the feedback publicly with my students. I walk them through the results on the projector at the front of the room, unpacking key trends or comments. Once, there was a harsh comment about my teaching, and several of the students reacted. One asked, looking around the room, incredulous, “Who would say that?” I replied, “Someone who feels the teaching isn’t reaching them. And that’s helpful, even if the tone is a little harsh.” Walking through the feedback itself is an act of learning how to give and take feedback—for me and my students. I’m modeling for them how to take feedback to become better without taking it personally. Yes, it takes some courage to do this, but I find that after the first time, students become quite helpful (and less harsh!) in tailoring their feedback to actionable items I can work on because they see that I want to hear their insights and that I do reflect on them. (See a sample course experience survey here.)
While this specific use doesn’t support the Transformational Learning Principle of “providing timely and specific feedback to students,” I believe that students are best equipped to receive our feedback and use it as a tool to improve their growth when we ourselves model that very practice. If we believe that creating a culture of feedback for students will benefit their learning and growth, then logic applies that it should also benefit us, their teachers. If we want students who are open to feedback, we educators should also be open to well-designed, constructive feedback.
The Benefits of Reflection
You’d be hard-pressed to think of a field in which feedback isn’t vital to the growth and success of anyone in that field. The business leader, the Olympic athlete, the sculptor, and the engineer all improve their craft and aim for success through frequent, varied, and authentic feedback focused on their success against specific criteria. Allowing our students multiple modes of feedback and opportunities to be successful in our courses prepares them for their futures better than a “one-and-done” or high-stakes testing mentality does. Creating a culture of feedback means creating a culture in which we value learning over speed or efficiency.
“Just because we taught it doesn’t mean they learned it.” Let’s use practical feedback methods like the ones I shared, and many others that educators have developed or improved upon, to ensure that the goals and incentives are focused on learning, not coverage.
Reflect & Discuss
➛ How do you ensure your students are reading your feedback, digesting it, and using it to improve?
➛ Do you regularly solicit feedback from students on your teaching? If not, what is one way you could start?
