Providing Feedback: Personal Experience Insights

In our Personal Experience Insights series, members of the Everspring Learning Design department share first-hand accounts of creating online learning content and meaningful takeaways from their professional experiences.

Claire Hernandez is a Faculty Engagement Specialist on the Learning Design team at Everspring. She has more than nine years of experience teaching elementary students and facilitating professional development for adults. Claire has a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from Olivet Nazarene University and is based in Chicago, Illinois.

From kindergarten to postsecondary education, feedback is a core component of effective instruction. Research suggests that the combination of positive and constructive feedback can have significant impacts on student achievement, motivation, and self-efficacy (Ani, 2019; Faulconer et al., 2022). However, in practice, providing feedback effectively can be a challenging task—something I learned firsthand as a new teacher. In this piece, I will share my journey of improving my feedback practices and offer practical tips for how you might apply these lessons in higher education.

I earned my bachelor’s degree in elementary education after four years of hard work, dedication, and determination to be the best educator I could be. While earning my degree, I spent two years volunteering and shadowing in local classrooms, and I student-taught for the majority of an entire school year. I spent my free time reading about teaching best practices and learning from veteran educators. I prided myself on doing everything I could to enter my career as a great teacher and still, I would inevitably make mistakes. Despite my preparation, I struggled to effectively provide feedback.

As a new kindergarten teacher in 2015, I found myself mainly reaching out to students’ parents when I needed something from them or when I was addressing disciplinary issues. I realized the only intentional positive feedback I provided was through report cards and quarterly parent-teacher conferences. While students would receive positive verbal feedback in the classroom, their parents were not informed. Consequently, parents often seemed defensive when I delivered negative or constructive feedback, or they were simply unresponsive. I had unintentionally reinforced a stigma around the teacher calling home.

Determined to break the negative stigma around parent-teacher communication, I re-evaluated my methods of delivering feedback the following year. I planned to make a more deliberate effort to balance negative and constructive feedback with positive feedback. You might be surprised to learn that the insights I gained from providing feedback as a kindergarten teacher are also relevant to teaching asynchronous courses in higher education. Here is an outline of how I enhanced my feedback practices and how they can be applied in an asynchronous higher education setting:

In the first two weeks of the school year, I called every student’s parents to share something positive I learned and appreciated about their child. This feedback was typically not centered around academic performance and instead highlighted personality traits, social skills, or passion. Although time-consuming, this task set a collaborative tone for the entire school year.

Students in higher education benefit from early connections and positive feedback just as much as young children. Build community early in your course to establish trust and encourage open communication. Consider creating a video announcement welcoming students to the course or participating in introductory discussion boards to make connections with your students.

I continued highlighting students’ successes regularly, and when I needed to deliver negative or constructive feedback, I made sure to balance it with positive feedback and tangible support. Students and their parents came to understand that a phone call home was not always about a concern or problem, as I made sure to reach out with varied and balanced types of feedback. This approach led to more open and less defensive communication with students’ parents.

In higher education, consistent and balanced feedback can support student growth and engagement. Be intentional about balancing your feedback by offering positive comments when you recognize students’ strengths, ensuring that constructive feedback is not the only type they receive from you. When grading written assignments in Canvas, markup in DocViewer might help you to highlight well-written statements or insightful points while also indicating and commenting on areas for improvement.

I focused on providing feedback that was concise and clear, which made it more impactful and less time-consuming. Instead of using vague, broad statements, like “Your student is struggling with letter identification,” I provided a specific example of their performance, identified a goal, and offered a few ideas for practice. Broad statements often left parents and students feeling defeated, but clear, detailed feedback connected to a goal empowered them to improve.

When telling your higher education students there is a skill or an understanding they need to improve, be clear and specific about what success would look like. Consider using rubrics to clearly communicate criteria to students and highlight specific areas of improvement. Additionally, the “message students who” feature in the Canvas Gradebook or New Analytics can help you quickly and efficiently provide support to multiple students with similar needs.

By the time I needed to discuss academic or behavioral concerns, I had already built strong partnerships with students and families, resulting in more constructive conversations, increased parental support, and a more positive classroom environment. While small adjustments were needed to adapt to each new class, this framework continued to be significantly more effective than my first year of giving feedback.

Regardless of which education level you teach, it is essential that you regularly reflect on and adjust your communication and feedback habits to best meet the needs of your students.

Transforming your approach to feedback can feel overwhelming, but consider starting small by making one change at a time. Reflect on your current practices. Do you tend to give one feedback type more than another? When a student's work impresses you, do you highlight their specific strengths? When identifying areas for improvement, do you direct students toward helpful resources? By making just a few changes to your feedback delivery, you could see long-lasting positive impacts in your online learning environment.

Ani, A. (2019). Positive feedback improves students’ psychological and physical learning outcomes. Indonesian Journal of Educational Studies, 22(2), 134–143.

Faulconer, E., Griffith, J., & Gruss, A. (2021). The impact of positive feedback on student outcomes and perceptions. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 47(2), 259–268.