“I Did So Badly”: Reframing Approaches to Feedback

“I Did So Badly”: Reframing Approaches to Feedback

Raisa Shaikh | Sep 29, 2026

This article considers how feedback can move beyond grades to become a meaningful conversation, helping students reflect on their learning, recognise their strengths and take greater ownership of their improvement.

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It’s the assessment feedback lesson and you’re already mentally preparing for the onslaught.

The whippet-fast movements of their eyes scanning to find the grade.

The rustles of paper and whispers as numbers float their way around the room, even though you’ve asked them three times to read their feedback silently.

The myriad of expressions once that number has been found and/or shared: relief, elation, confusion, frustration.

This is usually followed by that one student who asks “who got the highest in the class?” far too loudly and is then topped off with another student marching to your desk, asking you (with your crystal ball capabilities) how they can get a higher grade next time, only to be met with:

“Have you actually read the feedback?”

The process of providing student feedback that is meaningful, purposeful and manageable for us as teachers has been an ongoing battle for a long time. Throughout my career so far, I have seen a slew of strategies tried and tested in order to reposition feedback as a conversation, making it more than just the act of teacher giving and student receiving.

Within English as a subject specifically, there is an added layer in that writing an essay in response to a text that they have attempted to connect to feels like a personal expression of intellect and opinion. Coupled with the fact that teenagers often express and communicate with absolute thinking (something is either the best or worst thing that has ever happened, there is no middle ground), a grade that isn’t perceived as the best equals being wholly bad.

The result is a domino effect that presents barriers to student improvement in the following ways:

• Ego damage: The student fixates on the mark and often becomes defensive or highly resistant to making improvements, leading to a temporary shut down (Butler, 1988; Kluger & DeNisi, 1996).
• Cognitive truancy: By asking “how do I get a better grade?” without having actually read the feedback, they are throwing the hot potato and the hard work back to you when you’ve already marked their work.
• Singular Evaluation: The student feels that their expressions of voice, opinion and intellectual abilities are being wholly judged, rather than a single assessment being a snapshot of where they currently are and where they can go.

Instead, we can try to go beyond just having the academic post-mortem and encourage our students to see what actionable future steps can be taken to ensure improvement (Dweck; Hattie & Timperley, 2007).

More importantly, we have a key role in the delivery of those steps.

We have all had those moments of frustration where a student has not actively engaged with their feedback and thought ‘But I spent so long marking their essays and the feedback was there, how did they not get it?’.

When it comes to bridging the conversational gap with feedback, we can look at a study conducted by the University of Surrey: Building Feedback Literacy: Students’ Perceptions of the Developing Engagement With Feedback Toolkit (Winstone, Mathlin, & Nash, 2019).

The report specifies that it is due to specific cognitive and emotional obstacles that students struggle to engage with feedback. These range from an awareness barrier and not actually knowing the academic language that we mark with, struggling to select which feedback implementation methods to use and the emotions that come with the pressures of assessments.

It also discusses strategies that can be utilised to combat these obstacles:

• Managing emotions before the actions.
• Demystifying language so that students are aware of what to look for.
• Providing trends-based conversations to keep feedback focused.

So, what do these strategies actually look like in an English classroom?

My own approaches to feedback have varied over the years too, but when it comes to facilitating feedback as a conversation and getting the most of out my students during a feedback lesson, I have found the following routines very helpful:

• Banishing Shame: Setting a classroom culture that provides emotional safety has proven to offset anxieties, especially by reminding them that they all demonstrated skills – nobody handed me a blank piece of paper!
• A Task Reminder: Clarifying what it was they actually needed to do in the assessment and what the Criterions were (there’s always one student who didn’t read the question).
• Whole- Class Strengths and Highlighting with Colour 1: I point out what the key strengths of the class as a whole were during my marking process (such as good use of quotations, authorial analysis etc), and they ‘map’ where they have done that in their own pieces. This part in particular provides reassurance, especially for students who tend to fixate solely on the ‘negative’, rather than acknowledge what they have in the first place.
• Whole – Class Improvements and Highlighting with Colour 2: I point out what the key points of improvement are and with another colour, students ‘map’ where there may be gaps in their writing or where a skill needs a boost.

What students end up with is a visual skill map that then feeds directly into the final stage:

• Green Pen Reflection: The second colour acts as a clear signpost to students in terms of where they should focus their improvement work for the remainder of the lesson. It also acts as the anchor for conversations in that should a student wish to have further clarification or discussions with us, they are the ones actively pointing out where the improvements need to be made and we can then figure out the next steps together.

But there are still tweaks and refinements I am wanting to make this year, based on the following questions:

• Are the students highlighting accurately?
• How can I ensure consistency of improvements across assessments as opposed to just in one feedback lesson?
• What about the students who have a minimal second colour, how do I keep stretching them?
• What might this look like across subjects where there is a clear right and wrong answer?

To clarify, my findings are based solely in English, but what I have considered for the last question is how feedback conversations in other subjects might revolve around content knowledge, processes and identifying error patterns with students focusing on a ‘reflective’ task mirroring what was being assessed. Suggestions from scientists, mathematicians, linguists and design technologists are welcome here!

In essence, the notion of reframing approaches to feedback is rooted in the idea of helping our students dismantle the binary of doing ‘badly’, because we know what it is to see a student writing off their entire ability because of one mark. By cultivating our own feedback literacy, we can encourage our students to take stock of the skills they have, be accountable for their learning and chart their progress going forward.

Reference List

• https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0969595980050102
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366019398_Revisiting_The_Power_of_Feedback_from_the_perspective_of_the_learner
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333148524_Building_Feedback_Literacy_Students’_Perceptions_of_the_Developing_Engagement_With_Feedback_Toolkit

Teacher's Bio

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