As a teacher and human being, I privilege feedback that is specific and actionable. When people observe me, I want to hear specific changes I can turn around and make in the next period like: try reading aloud from the back of the room or use the equity sticks to get more participation. I feel the same way about positive feedback. I don't want to hear "good job," rather "good job emphasizing specific words kids used that you thought were strong." I cannot keep doing the things I am doing well if the feedback is not specific!

As such, my goal is to privilege the same ideas with my students. I see the notion of giving specific, actually useful feedback in the article, "The Secret of Effective Feedback" where William discusses the importance to providing feedback that is useful to that person in that moment given the foundation they have. When it comes to positive feedback, instead of "nice job!" I might say, "nice job using a vocabulary word in your answer. I can tell you know what it means." This piece of feedback builds on the foundation the student has. They get the message that using unit vocabulary shows strong work and so they hopefully continue to do so. When it comes to constructive feedback with students, I have been striving to focus on the most important and specific ideas. This can be tricky when students need help with content and formatting and grammar and spelling and analysis and and and. I think this is where William's ideas really come in handy. Kids need feedback based on where they are in this moment as opposed to where we think they should be or other errors that distract us, such as issues with spelling or handwriting or decoding. So I try to focus where we will get the most bang for our buck, usually relating back o the learning target. If our goal is formatting dialogue correctly, I might sit down and go over conventions until they get it. If our goal is providing reasoning for evidence, I might overlook the mis-formatted dialogue for now and focus instead on asking questions to elicit stronger reasoning. Again, the feedback is specific and actionable. It is what I want the student to get out of this lesson right now and it is limited to the day's goal so as not to be overwhelming.

As a side note, in ELA I often find that focus on content and argumentative thinking outweigh our focus on spelling and grammar. I imagine this is even more true in most other disciplines because they assume we are tackling these things. And we are, but if we stopped for every spelling and grammar mistake, we would never get through all our content. Sometimes I struggle with balancing both my instruction and my feedback to meet students need for spelling and grammar work and my desire to get to what I consider "meatier" topics. Not sure on the answer here but often curious...