New Teacher Talk tackles something every teacher pours hours into and often watches go to waste: feedback. Hosts Dr. Beth Wilkins and Dr. Anna Quinzio-Zafran welcome Dr. Aletha Williams, a program manager and educator development coach, to help you design feedback students will actually pick up and use, instead of the kind that gets skipped on the way to the grade.
Aletha names the problem plainly. When students flip straight to the grade and file the assignment away, the comments you wrote never change their thinking, and feedback that does not change thinking or work is not really feedback, it is commentary. She points to three familiar failure modes, feedback that is too vague, too late, or too overwhelming, and offers a simple diagnostic: if a student cannot answer what do I do next after reading your comments, the feedback is not usable yet. From there she lays out five concrete strategies, each with examples across elementary, middle, and high school.
The five strategies:
She closes with a ready-to-use toolkit: a feedback sentence bank, voice notes, single-target rubrics, and revision checklists drawn straight from your feedback. Her advice for getting started is refreshingly doable. Pick one strategy, one assignment, one clear step.
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