Best Ways to Share Feedback with Students

On to telling a PhD student their paper needs work (Without causing a career crisis) Tough feedback is part of earning a PhD. But. There's a trick to it. You can't coddle the student. Or they miss the feedback. BUT. You can't be so mean that you trigger an existential spiral that ends with, “Maybe I should go to law school.” So how to do it? Without being a destroyer of dreams. 1. Sandwich tough feedback—with compliments. “Great lit review framing. The hypotheses need work. But your voice is strong and the argument has promise.” Translation: I’m about to crush a section, but you have something to build on. Do not offer stale overused praise like “Good effort.” Use real compliments that are directly relevant to the paper. 2. Use the phrase: “This is common at this stage” It moves the comment from “You’re a disaster” to “You’re right on schedule.” “This is a common issue in early drafts. The contribution just needs sharper positioning.” Magic. Seriously. It lets the student know they are normal. 3. Blame the paper, not the person Say: “The discussion meanders a bit.” Not: “You don’t seem to know what you’re talking about.” If you depersonalize it, the student will fix it. If you personalize it, the student will take a LOOONG time to get to it. 4. Offer a way forward Don’t just say “this doesn’t work.” Say: “This doesn’t land yet—have you looked at how [X paper] frames a similar argument?” Now it’s not a failure. It’s a useful feedback. 5. End with: “This is fixable.” No matter how rough it is, always end with hope. “This is fixable” means: I’m not giving up on you—and neither should you. And. When you say it is fixable. Give direction on how. Say: “Let’s break this into 3 chunks.” Then. Schedule times to follow up on each chunk. So the student doesn't feel alone. You’re coaching, not assigning miracles. Feedback doesn’t have to break a student to make them better. You can be honest, and direct and motivate a student to revise their paper —not to rewrite their career plan. To do it, you need to take a little time, show a little compassion, and offer support. And. When you do, you win, bc your student will grow! Best of luck! #academicjourney

One of the ways I'm incorporating #AI in the feedback loop for students in my writing class is to use it as a guide for talking points when they go to the language lab for support. I told students I would be using Brisk Teaching for round 1 (maintaining transparency about when I'm using AI and hopefully leading by example), where it creates feedback points based on my rubric and inserts them in a table at the top of their essay. Using Google Docs, I converted the bullet points to checkboxes (though it would be nice if Brisk did this part automatically), so students can go through point by point and show me that they're at the very least looking at the feedback before the next round of writing. Next, I asked students to highlight one point from each category and use the comment feature to speak to it. This could be any variation of responses: 🔦 Spotlighting an issue that they know they need to work on and how they're dealing with it in this paper 🙅♀️ Disagreeing with the AI and explaining why they don't want to make the change it's suggesting ❓ Asking for clarification on how to respond to a point ➕ Etc. Next, when they go to the lab to get help, these highlights and the changes they made will form the foundation for the talking points when they work with the professor. One of the biggest problems when students go to a lab for support is always training them to be prepared instead of going in and saying "please check my paper" rather than empowered with a specific learning goal in mind. So the goal here is to have them go in with 5 already acted upon (or at least considered) points to discuss in order to make a more productive lab time. The screenshot is a sample that I sent to my students to understand the concept. I'm sure there will be some fine-tuning, but already many of them are interacting more with their early drafts and even coming to me to make sure that they're building good responses to talk to the professor in the lab about. I'll need more exploration, but to me this is a good way to take advantage of the strengths of AI, continue to challenge students to think critically about what it generates, and wrap it all in a human-centered approach focused on student learning rather than just using a shiny toy for the sake of it. #AIinESL #ArtificialIntelligence #TESOL #TESL #TESOL #ELT #LanguageLearning #Composition #StudentSuccess

My go-to method for giving feedback to my students (it's NOT a "compliment sandwich" :) 👉 It's COIN! C - Context O - Observation I - Impact N - Next steps For example: "In our mock interview (C), I noticed that you kept circling back and repeating information when describing your design process (O). This repetition could potentially give the impression that you're unsure of your own methods (I). Let's work on creating a clear, linear narrative for each project and practice it until you can confidently deliver it within 2-3 minutes (N)." Why it works ↴ - It's clear and direct. No sugar-coating! - It focuses on specific actions and their effects. - It provides actionable next steps. - It avoids confusion (the feedback receiver knows exactly what to work on) What's your go-to feedback method? Share your thoughts below! 👇 #ux #uxcareers #UXLeadership #FeedbackTips