Useful Feedback, More Than Praise, Helps Students Flourish is a new and useful article in Scientific American where researchers discuss the idea of what they call “agentic feedback.”

The practice itself isn’t a new one to many teachers.  But I do like the phrase.

The idea is that teachers just don’t tell students what they’ve done wrong.  Instead, we provide guidance and challenge students to figure out the specifics.

For example, if a student turns in an essay or story without a good “hook,” instead of doing the work for them and telling them a hook to use, we might ask them to again review the sheet where we had learned the different types of hooks, ask them if they see any one of them in their essay and, then, assuming the answer is “no,” ask them to choose and write one.

There are various “takes” on this idea.

Concept attainment is one.

And Dylan Wiliam talks about as making feedback “detective” work.  See Make feedback into detective work  from Tips For Teachers and this next tweet:

I’m adding this info to:

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