120 hr. TEFL Course Module 7-Pedagogy (Pt.11 Constructive Criticism)

Module 7: Pedagogy

7.4 Constructive criticism


The whole process we discussed in the previous section does not have to fall only on your shoulders as the teacher. Great teachers make students part of the process, asking them to reflect on their own learning and identify what kept them from being successful. To do that, they need to receive honest and specific feedback from you on their performance. Telling a student “good job” isn’t going to help them improve at all. They don’t even know what they did well when you say something like that. Honesty is important, but it is also important that you are sensitive to the fact that excessive criticism could simply demotivate your students. Here are some tips for providing your students with constructive criticism:

First of all, you need to make sure that your expectations for student work are very clear to them. If they properly understand what is expected, you can get a true picture of what they are able to accomplish, and they don’t feel blindsided by your feedback. If you have the opportunity, you may even want to provide your students with examples to show them what a successful assessment looks like as opposed to an unsuccessful assessment.

When you are providing feedback, be specific. There is nothing more worthless than vague, general feedback. You are already going to have to overcome the obstacle of students not paying attention to your feedback; if you provide meaningless feedback, they are even less likely to focus on it. This is important when you are giving feedback on what they did well as much as it is when you are providing feedback on their weaknesses.

Try to balance your positive and negative feedback. Never provide just negative feedback; there is always something good that you can say. While a student will still be pretty upset getting overwhelmingly negative feedback, it will definitely help that you have provided a silver lining so that they see that their work was not worthless.

Refer back to your instruction. If students are struggling with something you have not taught in the unit, then it is something you will have to discuss with them; if it is something that you have gone over, then you will probably have to go over it again. When the students are struggling with something you haven’t taught, it may not be fair for you to punish them for it, so instead provide them with encouraging feedback that identifies the weakness and promises you’ll discuss as a class.


Require your students to do some sort of reflection activity that forces them to read or review the feedback you have provided. If they do not receive the feedback, what is it accomplishing?