Life-Hacks for Giving Student Feedback

Below is a list of hacks for providing feedback that were compiled from a variety of sources, including The Care and Feeding of Helpful Feedback, and The Canvas Instructors Guide,

• Be mindful of your own state of mind, and avoid grading when angry, frustrated, tired. The hope is that when we grade, we will be like Gandalf — a perfect mixture of wisdom, kindness, and knowledge that dispenses exactly the right feedback in exactly the right amounts. But even Gandalf had bad days, and when you’re depleted, we tend to lash out, even at students when we grade. I think we’ve all done it, and it’s never good. So if you need to break from grading for an hour, an evening, a day, or a weekend — do it, if it will make your feedback helpful, and don’t put yourself in a position you might regret.

• Watch your language. Along the same lines, be mindful of what you say or write. Don’t use language that’s condescending, mansplaining, or angry. Some specific items to watch are second person pronouns, exclamation points, and capitalizations. For example, compare “You don’t have the correct set of assumptions for a contradiction proof” with “The contradiction proof doesn’t have the correct set of assumptions”. Yes, the student needs to own the error and fix it. Both statements allow the student to do so, the second statement depersonalizes the error.

• Text snippet tools are your friends. Use TextExpander for frequently used comments. This saves a lot of time — for example to enter in the phrase “Your work on Problem 1 shows progress in a useful direction, but there are also some gaps or errors that you will need to address in a revision of that problem” Just enter in the snippet ;;needsrev and the software does the rest. But not only is it a great time saver, it also allows the user to compose the feedback while in a calm or friendly state, and then later enter that feedback even if the user is tired or grouchy and therefore more likely to say something regretful.

• Relatedly, if you use the Comment feature in SpeedGrader, you already know that it can be a great way to provide personalized feedback to students, in a place that’s easy and obvious for them to access (their overall grades page). While using the SpeedGrader Comment field, you may want to utilize the SpeedGrader Comment Library. With this tool, you can save your commonly used feedback comments in an easy-to-reuse location. Access the Comment Library by clicking on the tiny “Speech Bubble” icon above the “Add A Comment” field; from here you can save new comments the library or select the one you want to add. You can also turn on an auto-fill option that causes comments from your library to pop up as you type.

• Try audio or video feedback instead of/in addition to written feedback. Some students respond more favorably to short video or audio snippets that give feedback than they do to text feedback, which can lose much of the emotional content of face-to-face communication (as we all know too well from bad emails). You might explore using tools for giving audio or video feedback in Canvas.

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