Improving Student-Teacher Relationships Through Feedback: The Development and Evaluation of the Stanford/Leading Educators Wise Feedback Professional Development Learning Series

High-quality academic feedback, especially feedback that highlights errors, mistakes, misunderstandings and shortcomings, is one of the most valuable tools teachers have for promoting student growth and learning. It is how teachers help students go beyond what they could accomplish on their own (Vygotsky, 1978). It is unsurprising, then, that high-quality feedback is an emphasis of many leading educational organizations.

However, providing effective feedback can also pose significant challenge for both givers and receivers. Sometimes, teachers avoid giving negative feedback to protect students’ feelings. Sometimes receiving critical feedback can sting. Then students may disengage from the very resource that could help them learn.

Inspired by innovative educators, the science of “wise feedback” has revealed a solution. Past laboratory and small-scale field experiments show that, when students understand critical feedback as a reflection of a teacher’s high standards and belief in their potential to meet those standards, the benefits for student learning and growth, and for teacher-student relationships, can be transformative.

What is needed to take these insights to scale is an efficient means to equip teachers with an understanding of the psychological dynamics that underlie the feedback exchange and how they can put this understanding to work with their students. The Stanford/Leading Educators Wise Feedback Professional Development (PD) Learning Series integrates hard-earned wisdom from educators with psychological theory and research to formalize and clarify the key constructs at play in the feedback exchange and a set of concrete strategies for delivering critical feedback that builds trust with students, promotes student engagement and motivation, and ultimately improves academic outcomes. The strategies emphasized in this learning series benefit all students, but can be especially helpful for students from historically marginalized backgrounds in education, for specific reasons we will discuss.

We describe the Wise Feedback PD Learning Series, including relevant theoretical background and the iterative design process we have used to develop and evaluate it. We then describe learnings from the largest deployment to date, along with follow-up steps and future directions.