Why Feedback Is the Real Future-Ready Skill

Authored by Ms Maggie

Teaching content is a great start, but teaching content alone isn’t enough to prepare students for the real-world skills they’ll need in their careers. As the instructional coach for YaizY, I have the privilege of working alongside teachers to weave career-ready skills into everyday learning. One of the most powerful ways we do this is by focusing on feedback, both in the real-time guidance teachers give during project work and in the peer-to-peer feedback students exchange. These simple but intentional practices help students strengthen communication, collaboration, and reflection skills that will serve them across their careers and lives.

Real-world workplaces value constructive, timely feedback that’s delivered in a way that feels supportive while also spurring growth. Feedback is certainly important as an assessment tool, but feedback delivery and feedback acceptance are also skills that need to be taught. 

Our teachers are coached on implementing feedback into every live lesson, modeling feedback in the moment during project work. Using the screenshare feature of our platform, teachers scan student screenshares. Based on those real-time observations, teachers can surface class trends or refine common misconceptions for the class. When a more private response is needed, teachers guide students in individual breakout rooms or through private chat messages. No matter the feedback delivery method, every interaction models acknowledging what’s going well and offering support for what needs more work.

Feedback shouldn’t just come from teachers, though. Student-to-student feedback builds skills in collaboration and reflection. This type of feedback can be trickier to build as a practice, though. First and foremost, our teachers develop the necessary felt sense of safety in the virtual classroom by establishing a positive class culture that values error and building authentic connections with students. With that culture in place, teachers can support peer-to-peer feedback with frameworks like Glows and Grows, Notice and Wonder, and Compliment Sandwich or through the use of sentence stems.

Building a feedback practice isn’t without its challenges. Teachers face time constraints, student hesitancy, and uneven participation. A few hacks that we employ to overcome these challenges: selective student showcalls based on priorities identified from student screenshares, practicing feedback delivery to a class mascot to normalize giving feedback, and celebrating great feedback moments.

The workplaces our students join will demand adept giving and receiving of constructive criticism. When we prepare them, our students can rise to meet this challenge with confidence that’s rooted in a growth mindset, ready to take on the careers of the future.   

Let’s connect to talk about how we can work together to make CTE learning more engaging, build future-ready skills, and affect meaningful outcomes for your organization through project-based learning - https://yaizy.io/contact-yaizy