Teachers who care about creating a sense of belonging in their students face a daunting list of factors they do not control, including ever-shifting student hierarchies, complicated home and family dynamics, and growing rates of cell phone and AI usage. However, even amidst this complicated reality, there remains an area where teachers can influence and increase relational trust and student belonging—through the words they use to engage with students and respond to their work.
Teachers who are intentional in the ways they give feedback to students can deepen belonging and simultaneously foster intellectual growth, creating learning environments with high expectations and high support. Effective feedback supports students and gives them confidence in their learning. I’ve seen it firsthand in my own students. In a recent end-of-semester reflection, one of my 11th grade philosophy students wrote:
At the start of class, I found it very difficult to read or write about philosophy, but the feedback and work we did together has made me feel much more confident. I used to look at philosophy as something I would never be able to do because I am not a philosophical thinker, but now I realize that with some hard work and practice, I am able to do something I didn’t expect to be able to do.
Grant Wiggins defines feedback as “information about how we are doing in our efforts to reach a goal” (2012). However, the efficacy of all feedback is not created equal. A 2020 meta-analysis of feedback interventions suggests that “one of the most consistent findings of the feedback research is the remarkable variability of effects,” echoing an earlier meta-analysis which found that more than one-third of the time when students received feedback, their subsequent performance was worse than if they had not received any feedback at all (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996; Wisniewski et al., 2020). Given that feedback can have adverse effects if not done thoughtfully, teachers must lean into research-informed practices that use feedback in positive ways to increase a student’s sense of being part of an intellectual community.
Two research-backed interventions, wise criticism and agentic feedback, can have powerful positive effects on student learning and belonging without overwhelming already over-full teacher workloads.
Wise Criticism: High Expectations and High Support
Teachers who wish to provide constructive feedback without demoralizing their students might find wise criticism useful. Wise criticism increases the trust students have in their teachers and their educational environments, making them more receptive to future feedback. Yeager and colleagues (2014) describe wise criticism as having two major parts: communicating critical feedback as evidence of a teacher’s high standards (and not their personal biases) and communicating the teacher’s belief in the student’s ability to reach those high standards. Teachers must also create learning environments with sufficient supports to help students reach those standards.
In one research study, for example, middle and high school humanities students received feedback on written work, with one subset of students receiving an additional note from their teacher that read: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations, and I know you can reach them” (Yeager et al., 2014). This one-sentence intervention benefited all students in the subset, and it had particularly positive effects on Black students who previously had less trust in their school environments. Afterward, this subset submitted rewrites more often, and their work tended to be of higher quality.
Crucially, this one sentence articulated for students the purpose of teacher feedback. As educators, we give feedback because we care about our students and their learning. However, that purpose is not always clear to our students. In his book Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides, Geoffrey Cohen asks, “Isn’t it obvious that teachers should tell students they believe in their ability to reach a higher standard?” It may seem obvious, but he reveals a striking finding: “No teachers we have ever worked with have reported that they had been doing so when giving criticism” (Cohen, 2022). The combination of stated belief in student potential, alongside constructive feedback, is the crucial component of the wise criticism approach. This was the approach that my philosophy student resonated with: feedback that was both encouraging and firm, dedicated time in class to make meaning with it, and subsequent assessments where she could apply what she had learned in new contexts.
Agentic Feedback: Questions, Not Corrections
A further question remains for us: After having given wise criticism, what should other feedback look like? My student made such progress because she did a lot of thinking and learning. Her growth as a philosopher came because of the efforts she made in dialogue with my feedback—feedback that often asked her questions and prompted her to reflect on patterns in her writing and thinking. This approach to feedback is known as agentic feedback, something scholar Camilla Griffiths defines as “feedback that provides students with informative opportunities to independently revise their writing” (Griffiths et al., 2023).
The interaction with feedback is the intervention: that’s when our well-chosen words resonate in the minds, hearts, and dispositions of our students.
Agentic feedback is a particularly effective form of feedback because it helps students close the gap between where they are and where they need to be. For example, instead of correcting grammar errors, a teacher giving agentic feedback might write, “There are at least two comma splices in this assignment. Find them, correct them, and then write a couple sentences about how you will think differently about commas going forward.” Feedback like this inspires student thinking and reflection and is much more effective than teacher corrections; it also empowers students by welcoming them into a learning community that treats them and their ideas with respect. My students know that I will take their ideas seriously and evaluate them with care, and this pedagogical intentionality helps them feel like they belong to an intellectual community.
By contrast, merely correcting student work—covering a test or essay with red ink—discourages student agency. It risks conveying the low-trust message: “You can’t figure this out. I’ll do it for you.” Agentic feedback nurtures trust and belonging by initiating a dialogue in which students can reflect on their own choices and, in the process, learn from them. A bonus to this method: Students whose teachers give this type of feedback are more likely to believe their teachers have higher expectations for them (Griffiths, 2023).
Effective Feedback Plus Engagement
These two approaches illustrate straightforward changes that teachers can make in their feedback practices to deepen student belonging and learning. However, these shifts alone are not enough. As Yeager (2014) notes, “Wise criticism interventions can remove a barrier to better performance, but they must also be accompanied by real opportunities for growth.” For Yeager, these opportunities for growth come from a school environment that asks students to do meaningful work and has a high expectation/high support culture. In other words, these interventions are part of the fabric of an institution, not one-offs. It is hard to overstate the importance of these factors. But something else is needed as well: Students must engage with the feedback they receive—and teachers must dedicate time for this engagement.
As I wrote in a previous article in this magazine, “When we give feedback to students, our work is only half done” (Housiaux & Dickson, 2022). Students do not learn the moment a teacher puts feedback on their work; rather, they learn when they reflect on and make meaning of the feedback. The interaction is the intervention; that’s when our well-chosen words resonate in the minds, hearts, and dispositions of our students. Otherwise, no matter how wise, how agentic, how perfectly precise our feedback is, our words on the page remain just that: words on a page.
Given this insight, we must find ways for students to engage with and learn from our wise criticism and agentic feedback. The intentionality we bring to our feedback efforts must be mirrored by well-designed feedback reflection systems; without the latter, students will not benefit in the ways we intend. Here are two ways to give students time to reflect on and apply feedback to their work.
Reflection System One: Summative Analysis in Mathematics
In her math classes at Princeton Day School in New Jersey, my colleague Marina MacDonald’s students reflect on their learning and mistakes with an assessment analysis tool.
This tool (see fig. 1) exemplifies agentic feedback in several ways: Instead of fixing student errors—and thereby doing all the thinking—MacDonald only tells her students if their work is correct or incorrect. After receiving this feedback, her students reflect on and correct their own work, explaining their updated thinking in numbers, symbols, and words. Students conclude by writing about their own strengths and areas for growth.
Because they do this work, they do the learning. This metacognitive reflection is a crucial component of helping students become stronger mathematicians and has been shown in other STEM contexts to deepen a sense of agency and self-efficacy—factors that suggest this approach could work well in other disciplines (Trujillo & Tanner, 2014). Over time, students see patterns in their strengths and areas for growth. In turn, these areas become targets for reflection, study, and development. This tool is powerful because it takes students seriously as mathematicians and invites them to reflect on their choices and the ways in which these choices are or are not successful. MacDonald’s presence is consistently positive and collaborative. In her classroom, she and her students work together to tackle mathematical challenges instead of bickering over points and partial credit.
Reflection System Two: A Feedback Dialogue
As I learned more about the principles of effective feedback, I understood a perennial teaching problem in a new way. To address the fact that some students kept making the same mistakes over and over, I adopted a low-tech solution that enabled significantly greater student engagement with feedback: a Google Doc.
I now ask my students to do all their writing for an entire course in a single document. Here’s how it works: Students write in their document, I give them feedback, and then right below this feedback, they write a response and plan how they will apply the feedback going forward. When students begin their next assignment, their plan for improvement—developed in dialogue with my feedback—sits front and center. Foregrounding this metacognitive reflection helps students remember specific focus areas; it also leads to significantly more student learning and improvement and to fewer repeat errors.
Just as important, because I know students can access our ongoing dialogue at any time, I don’t feel pressure to give feedback on absolutely everything in any one assignment. Instead, I prioritize agentic feedback on the most important items, knowing that I can look back at the longer trajectory of student work and learning at any time. This document, a portfolio of sorts, also becomes a repository of my attention and belief in my students—ongoing evidence of the high standards and high support that are the hallmark of wise criticism. At the end of the semester, when they look back on their learning and growth, they can see clear links between the effort they put into improving and the ways in which they now contribute more fully to an intellectual community—self-generated evidence of the links between deliberate practice, metacognitive reflection, and belonging.
Centering Dignity and Respect in Feedback and Teaching
In a book written 10 years after developing his wise criticism intervention, David Yeager looks back on that research. He writes, “The secret sauce of wise feedback wasn’t what was written on the note. It was the dignity and respect afforded to young people at a time when they were vulnerable. That’s not magic; it’s the human condition” (Yeager, 2024).
We can meet students and their many vulnerabilities with warmth, care, and a deep belief in their ability to learn. Furthermore, we can give feedback that embodies these beliefs by attending carefully to the words we use to respond to student work and giving students time to reflect on and respond to these words. When we do this, we treat students and their intellectual work with dignity and respect, something that can have a profoundly positive impact on them, both in the moment and in the long run.
Reflect & Discuss
When giving feedback, how do you balance helping students discover answers independently with ensuring they don’t become frustrated or lost?
What strategies have you used to ensure students actually engage with the feedback they receive from you?
