Feedback That Gets Used
The Three Line Rewrite
A working session, not a checklist. Bring five real comments you wrote this week. You finish holding five a student can act on, plus the pattern you can run on the rest of the stack.
About twenty minutes. Nothing here is generated for you. Every line is yours.
Put your real comments on the table
Open the last assignment you graded and copy five comments out of it, word for word. Do not clean them up. The point of this phase is to see your own defaults, and a tidied comment is somebody else’s default.
Label what each one actually is
A verdict tells a student where they landed. An instruction tells them what to do next. Most people find four of their five are verdicts. That is the finding, not a failure.
Rewrite each into three lines
Three lines each. What happened, the fix, what it is for. Same judgment you already made. Written in the order a student uses it.
Name the pattern and write it once
This is the phase people skip and it is the one that pays. Five comments is a sample. The pattern underneath them is the asset.
That is five. Now look at how many papers are left in the stack. Every one of them needs these same three lines, in your voice, tailored to what that student actually did. You are not short on judgment. You wrote the pattern down. You are short on a Saturday.
The Student Feedback Generator inside the Faculty Toolkit. Its own page describes it as “personalized, rubric aware feedback in your tone.” The word doing the work is “your.” It reads your Course Record and your Teaching DNA, so what comes back is the pattern you just wrote, applied to paper thirty six, in the way you write.
Review first, always. You read every comment before it reaches a student. The changes you make teach it.
Harvest Kernel . Plant Ideas. Cultivate Skills. Harvest Results.