Cultivating Critical Thinkers: Integrating Written and Verbal Feedback in Composition Instruction
As an English language and literature teacher of 18 years, I have gone through many iterations of feedback protocols in my classroom; from fixing every error I find on a student’s paper in a heavy red pen to audio feedback to one-on-one conferences to delaying scores for revisions. As most teachers of language are aware, many of these practices, while retaining value, can be incredibly time-consuming. What I have learned is we as teachers are doing too much and need to put the onus back on the students.
Feedback Expectations:
In anticipation of my students’ needs, I explain and revisit the course feedback expectations in my syllabus and at the start of each term.
● Students need to write more often than teachers can evaluate; practice is imperative for success.
● Feedback will be given verbally, in individual conferences, in small groups, in whole groups, in audio files, and written out based on course criteria.
● Composition teachers do NOT edit student writing or tell students what to write. Feedback is meant to help students think about their own writing and ideas, and revise.
● Feedback is actionable; students will be expected to do something with the feedback.
● Students will reflect upon and assess their own work often.
While these expectations might provide some clarity for students, they do not ensure understanding, which is why my feedback protocol has been an ongoing project.
What Feedback Means to Students:
I recently conducted a workshop at Robert College’s Autumn Teachers Conference called “Closing the Feedback Loop: Guiding Students to Assess Their Own Writing.” The aim of this workshop was to share my developing protocol to determine effective feedback practices for students while remaining sustainable and time-efficient for teachers. This article will describe the protocol in its current form.
In order to provide effective feedback for students, teachers need to understand the underlying issue: student feedback is not just about what students do with the feedback, but what they think feedback means.
In a recent survey, I asked my students, “What does feedback mean to you?” Responses included the following: “It means that I want to know what I missed and exactly what I can do to fix it,” “I need more specific guidance something like ‘change this to this,’” and “When I ask for ‘more feedback,’ I mean that I want to see the corrected forms of one or two of my mistakes. For example, ‘Instead of this, you could’ve said…’”
What these responses tell me is that my students don’t want a teacher: they want an editor. If I write these kinds of corrections on a student paper, it is no longer their writing; the ideas are no longer theirs, but mine–which is precisely why editors get a byline on published work.
Feedback Is Not an Exact Science:
The other issue is that our students have no idea how much effort is put into providing feedback on a piece of writing and then carefully determining its score, which is a very subjective practice and often why accurate scoring requires more than one teacher to look at a piece of writing–thus adding more time to the task. My colleagues and I in the English department–indeed, in ALL language arts departments–take hours to read over student writing, often struggling to interpret handwriting, and deciphering meaning through major and minor grammar errors. We then proceed to offer feedback to either show how we processed their work while scoring or to help them improve their writing for the next task.
This process has varying levels of success from teacher to teacher. Some students show improvements while others continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.
I am very careful about what I write on student papers, knowing that students may or may not find the information helpful. I also know that teachers need to explicitly tell students what the comments are for: information or revision–because if students don’t know, the comments are just a waste of both the student’s and the teacher's time. Every teacher has a different method for feedback, which offers its own vertical and horizontal challenges for the student. I have been told by some colleagues that what they write on student papers is to help them, the teacher, to verbally explain scores to their students when asked “for more feedback.” This might be done on a final exam where students will not be making revisions to the writing.
What the Research Says:
In his article “Is Written Feedback a Waste of Time?”, Educator Carl Hendrick referenced a recent study in which 937 German students were given written feedback on an English exam. The results showed that “20% of students completely ignored the feedback, making no revisions whatsoever” and “of the students who did engage with the feedback, 47% showed no improvement in their work.” Specifically, “...higher-performing students were actually less likely to improve after receiving feedback” (Hendrick, 2025). This is likely because the students were not asked to do something with the feedback.
What students actually need is feedforward–a management term named by Executive Coach Marshall Goldsmith and later conceptualized for educational purposes by Dr. Joe Hirsch. Jennifer Gonzalez’ Cult of Pedagogy article further describes Hirsch’s book The Feedback Fix: Dump the Past, Embrace the Future, and Lead the Way to Change, suggesting that feedback only reinforces negative habits rather than helping students develop as writers and thinkers. Gonzalez writes, “When we give feedforward, instead of rating and judging a person’s performance in the past, we focus on their development in the future” (Gonzalez, 2026).
This pedagogical practice is echoed in the work of Dylan William, an Emeritus professor of educational assessment at University of London. William offers very practical guidance for giving feedback, saying that it should be more about the student’s action than the teacher’s words. He stresses that if students don’t use feedback, it’s not effective, noting that “feedback should cause thinking,” instead of just correcting errors, and create opportunities for students to reflect, revise, and improve.
William advocates for structured peer- and self-assessment routines–so that not all feedback needs to come from the teacher–and utilizing questions. Instead of telling students what to change, teachers should ask guiding questions that help students figure out how to improve for themselves.
He also recommends delayed grades and warns that giving a grade alongside comments often means students ignore the feedback; it’s better to return work with only comments first.
This information correlates with my own experience in that I have seen that low-performing students struggle with what to do with feedback, high-performing students ask for more feedback, and ELL students and struggling readers want to simply be told what to write.
My Feedback Protocol:
A few years ago, while teaching in China, I started having students annotate their papers according to the rubric and then self-assessing their papers based on their annotations. This was a pre-emptive move, knowing that my students would ask for “more feedback” and justifications for their scores. I had just started teaching the IB Diploma Program English Language A course for the first time and was introduced to the IB English Guys, David Giles and Andrew Cohen, who offer many resources and workshops for DP English Language A. What I liked about their materials is that they color-coded their sample papers in correlation with the rubric.
Figure 1: sample of instructions given to students to annotate and self assess their writing
The practice of students revisiting their writing is an important part of the feedback process, even if they may not do this as accurately as a teacher. In both the AP and IB programs, most writing is done in a timed format, and students often forget what they have written in the stress-induced haze. Going back and re-reading what they wrote gives them a clear picture of what the teacher is seeing, and scoring it themselves forces them to look at the rubric closely. I also ask them to have an AI of their choosing score their writing using the rubric, so they can have another form of feedback.
Annotation and self-assessment usually takes place during the lesson following the assessment. In the next class, they will receive my whole-class feedback, based on common trends that I noticed while grading papers and common misconceptions that need to be addressed. Students are expected to track this feedback throughout the course. I have developed a Feedback Tracker for this purpose; it includes notes on whole class feedback, next steps after getting individual feedback, and a revision of some or all of their writing.
During the individual feedback step, students have their papers returned with two guiding questions at the bottom. These questions are about aspects of the text or task that they did not consider in their writing. While they then revisit the text or reconsider the task and answer the questions on the paper, I send them individual audio files with feedback through a Google Classroom assignment. This forces them to think about their writing and primes them for the audio feedback.
I started doing audio feedback in the last few years for two reasons: firstly, students usually want one-on-one conferencing, which is not always possible to do efficiently with large class sizes. Secondly, this process is faster for me. I read the student’s paper out loud, pausing to make comments that correspond to the notes I write on their papers. During this process, I am fully present and focused on the student’s work. They also benefit from hearing their writing read out loud.
The students then listen to the audio feedback and make revisions to their writing based on the whole-class and individual feedback provided. They note these next steps on the Feedback Tracker and link to their revision, as well. While students are revising their own writing, I like to share a model text that I have written and color coded in response to the same prompt.
Figure 2 Abridged sample entry for the Feedback Tracker
There are still students who struggle with the process (i.e. not knowing how to annotate, not knowing how to answer my guided questions about their work, etc.). I will sometimes write a partial response to the prompt and tell students to use it as a starting point for their revisions. I also spend more time conferencing with struggling students.
It is only after they have revised their writing that my students receive their scores–what William refers to as Delayed Scores.
While my feedback protocol is extensive and clearly takes class time, I have noticed marked improvements amongst students who follow the process with integrity and fidelity. The students who take the process seriously and seek to improve without cutting corners see the fruits of their labor. I also notice that when the procedure is followed, I am less likely to have students who question their grades. They may not be entirely happy with their scores, but they understand why they earned them through the intense revisiting and revising of their own writing–with their own ideas, not a set of corrections (edits) that I have lain out for them.
Key Takeaways:
Students need to revisit and self assess their work.
Students need feedback that gets them to think about their own writing and ideas.
Written feedback needs to be purposeful and actionable.
Give feedback back first; scores come later.
References
Giles, D., & Cohen, A. (n.d.). IB English Guys. https://ibenglishguys.com/
Gonzalez, J. (2026, March 18). Moving from feedback to Feedforward. Cult of Pedagogy.
Hendrick, C. (2025, March 28). Is written feedback a waste of time?. The Learning Dispatch.
William, D. (n.d.). Providing feedback that moves learning forward. YouTube.
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