Unleashing Curiosity with Feedback That Motivates
Unleashing Curiosity with Feedback That Motivates
We may love it, we may fear it, but one thing’s for sure: all learners need feedback to improve. This guide offers tips and ideas teachers can use to give students supportive, effective feedback that builds competence, confidence, and curiosity.
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McREL research shows that feedback may be the most powerful teaching strategy to help students learn. Studies also show, however, that when feedback is delivered in an evaluative or judging way, it shuts down students’ openness to learning and can foster a detrimental “fixed” mindset, casting doubt in students’ minds about their intelligence or abilities. When teachers interact with students in a warm, encouraging manner, their students demonstrate greater curiosity than students whose teachers are rigid, judgmental, or compliance-oriented. This 8-page quick reference guide provides teachers with research-based insights and strategies for providing feedback that encourages student effort and growth.
Our Unleashing Curiosity guides are part of McREL’s Curiosity Works® resources. Based in part on a successful system-wide effort in Melbourne, Australia that improved student achievement by unleashing student curiosity, these resources give teachers and school leaders tips, suggestions, and ideas to encourage professional dialogue with other teachers and increase student curiosity. Combining these insights with McREL’s analysis of best education practices from around the world, our Curiosity Works resources support a better way of transforming schools—not through top-down pressure, but through helping teachers and school leaders work together to develop shared professional expertise and leverage the power of motivation and curiosity.