Teaching Minute: Action-Oriented Feedback
Friday, 9/19/2025
This semester at the CTL, our theme is Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Each Teaching Minute will focus on part of a UDL principle and share options for a small adjustment you might try in your own teaching. We continue with the principle of Engagement, this time highlighting the practice of action-oriented feedback to help students focus with effort and persistence despite encountering challenges.
Why Action-Oriented Feedback Matters
UDL encourages us to provide our students with “action-oriented feedback”—feedback that let’s them know both what they’re doing well and what areas they should focus on to improve, offering concrete suggestions to achieve the learning goals of your course.
Feedback leads to better learning if it is provided incrementally over the semester and in close proximity to when students submit assignments. This type of feedback helps your students see learning as a process, and it reinforces that effort and practice are critical to their success, more so than “intelligence” or “inherent ability.” (from CAST)
And, if your feedback is grounded in the growth mindset framework, it can help to build students’ self-confidence and efficacy.
Practical Ideas to Try
Here are a few strategies you could experiment with—try just one to start:
- Consider writing a strength-based rubric, focusing on what is present and how to build upon it. Rubric language choice also matters - framing your criteria in a positive tone increases the likelihood of students reading your feedback. For example:
- Provide feedback in multiple formats, for instance, using Brightspace Video Note tool to record video or audio feedback on assignments (which Brightspace can automatically caption for you.)
- Make sure students know where to find your feedback and provide incentives for them to apply it to future assignments.
- Consider assigning peer feedback, providing guidance for students on how to make it actionable. Peer feedback can provide timely (no waiting for a busy instructor) and valuable feedback, but many students lack confidence and skills to give it. And without guidance on how to give effective feedback, most students provide it at a surface level. For example, peer editors are likely to focus on copyediting, not how to strengthen writing that is not meeting the assignment goals. Coach your students to use your rubric to provide each other with formative feedback, describing what they see, explaining how the assignment does or does not meet the criteria in the rubric, and offering specific suggestions for better alignment to the criteria.
Sample Part of Rubric
| - | 20pts Well Developed | 15pts Developing | 10pts Needs Developing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reference Citations | Writing includes at least 2 references from published reliable literature. All references and citations conform with APA format. | Writing includes 1 reference from published reliable literature. All references and citations conform with APA format. | The reflection would be strengthened by the inclusion of references that are properly formatted. |
| Godwin, Lindsey, July 21, 2025, Appreciative Inquiry Essentials: An Educational Day for UVM's Center for Teaching and Learning (PowerPoint Slides), David Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry, Champlain College. | |||
Dig Deeper
Looking for more? These resources expand on engagement through UDL and how Brightspace can help you provide quality feedback to students.
- CAST Guideline: Offer Action Oriented Feedback
- CTL video; chaptered, 60 minutes total: Brightspace Grading & Feedback This recorded workshop provides an overview of strategies for grading student work and providing feedback. We demonstrate tools to provide students feedback (inline grading, audio/video, rubrics), different grading workflows, including Quick Eval, and a snapshot of Brightspace's automated feedback tool - Intelligent Agents.
- Edutopia website: 5 Research-Based Tips for Providing Students with Meaningful Feedback Strenger, M. 2014.
- TED Talk, 10 minutes: The Power of Believing You Can Improve – Carol Dweck
If you want to talk through how UDL could work in your own course, the CTL team is here to brainstorm ideas, share strategies, or connect with upcoming workshops. Schedule a consultation with us to keep the conversation going!
Happy teaching!
Center for Teaching & Learning
www.uvm.edu/ctl
ctl@uvm.edu