Empowering Teachers to Provide Meaningful Feedback

Introducing Teacher Feedback! With this beta release, educators can provide effective feedback directly to individual students during a Pear Deck lesson.

Many of us were achievement-oriented students at one point or another. When teachers returned our papers, we anxiously flipped past their comments and edits to find the grade. We didn’t look at the teachers’ feedback as a learning opportunity, and we certainly didn’t understand their feedback was the key to unlocking further growth. We were only interested in the final grade, the summary judgment of our work.

When we became teachers, we then understood our teachers worked hard on that feedback, and we missed out on thousands of powerful learning moments. Much like their feedback, that realization came too late — the paper was over and done with, and the unit was in the past. We aren’t going to look back at their feedback, and even if we could, we wouldn’t know what to make of it. Some sentences received praise (‘great job!’), while others received needed criticism (‘needs clarification’). While we soaked up the positive notes, both the praise and the criticism were vague. Positive or negative, this kind of feedback didn’t help us understand what to do the next time around. Pleasing our teachers felt like a mysterious guessing game and, in hindsight, an unfortunate outcome of putting grades ahead of real learning.

Teachers need ways to provide clear, instructive feedback

Providing clear, instructive feedback is critically important to good teaching. It’s also very difficult because clear communication is always hard and often time-consuming. As many classrooms worked asynchronously during the pandemic, we were flooded with requests for a feature that enables teachers to give students feedback on their Pear Deck responses. While it was on our radar for future releases, we wanted to help you maximize remote instruction and get it into your hands as quickly as possible. So today, we’ve introduced the beta version of our Teacher Feedback feature!

With Teacher Feedback, you can give students clear, timely, and specific feedback on individual responses directly from your Teacher Dashboard. Doing so prompts understanding, drives metacognition, and promotes a growth mindset in students. This new premium feature works in remote and face-to-face learning environments.

This release gives teachers a way to:

• Provide individualized feedback directly to a student on a specific slide

• Prompt students to re-examine or adjust their original answer
• Increase communication and connection between teachers and students in remote learning environments
• Improve support for remote, blended, and flipped classrooms across all grade levels and subjects

This is just the beginning! For a refresher on best practices for giving feedback, check out our helpful Guide to Effective Teacher Feedback or get inspiration on how to make the most of the Teacher Feedback feature in our Knowledge Base article. We look forward to improving this beta release in the weeks to come based on your clear, timely, and specific feedback.