How to Help Your Kid Fill Out Feedback Forms for School Projects (Without Doing It For Them)
Last Tuesday, 8:15 pm, crumbs of chocolate chip cookie scattered across our kitchen table, Leo’s half-finished solar system diorama propped against the salt shaker, and he was staring at a one-page feedback form like it was written in ancient Greek. “I don’t know what to put,” he said, pushing the paper across the table toward me.
I’d just answered three work emails and was about to tell him the obvious: just write that printing Jupiter at the library took three tries because the filament kept jamming, right? But I paused. I remembered what his 4th grade teacher Ms. Riley told me at parent-teacher conferences back in the fall: most kids don’t get what these feedback forms are for. They think it’s another graded assignment, that every answer has to be perfect and positive to get a good mark. Most parents, myself included, end up doing the work for them without even meaning to.
Leo leaned back in his chair and tugged at the hem of his dinosaur pajamas. “What if I write the wrong thing?” he said. “What if Ms. Riley thinks I’m dumb because I didn’t learn anything fancy?” That’s when I realized I’d messed this up with his last project, two months earlier. He’d had to do a poster about rainforests, and I’d rewritten his whole feedback section to sound “impressive”: I developed strong research skills by checking multiple books and websites, I learned how all the animals in the rainforest rely on each other. When he got it back, Ms. Riley had scribbled a small note in the margin: Nice work! Next time, just tell me what you think, okay? That note stung, but it was a good wake up call. I’d turned a simple reflection exercise into a performance for the teacher, and Leo had learned nothing from it except that his own words weren’t good enough.
I pushed my laptop off the edge of the table and sat closer. Instead of telling him what to write, I started asking him small questions about what he actually remembered. The first question on the form was “What is one thing you learned while doing this project that you didn’t know before?” I said, “What’s the first thing you texted your cousin Jake when you started this?” He grinned immediately: “I texted him that Pluto isn’t a planet anymore, and I argued with him for 10 minutes because I still think it should be.” I said, “Write that down.” He blinked. “Really? That’s just my dumb argument, not a lesson.” I said, “Ms. Riley doesn’t want a textbook answer, she wants to know what stuck with you. That’s what stuck with you, right?” He shrugged and picked up his pencil, and wrote it out in his messy scrawl.
Next question: “What was the biggest challenge you faced during this project?” Leo froze again. “If I say I messed up the glue, that means I failed, right?” I thought about how an hour earlier, he’d been huffing because the thin styrofoam rings for Saturn wouldn’t stick to the sphere, he’d tried white glue, then super glue, then ended up wrapping them in masking tape to hold them down before painting them silver. I said, “What did you do when the glue didn’t work?” He said, “I tried three different kinds before I thought of tape.” I said, “So write that. A challenge isn’t failing. A challenge is something you had to figure out. That’s exactly what this question is asking for.” He wrote that down too, no pushback this time.
By the time we got to the last question: “What would you do differently if you did this project again?” he wasn’t even asking me for approval. He thought for 30 seconds, then wrote I would buy stronger glue so I don’t have to use tape, that’s it. I almost opened my mouth to add the thing I’d been thinking: that he should have started the project earlier instead of cramming it the night before it was due. But I shut it again. That’s my feedback, not his. His takeaway from the whole project was that bad glue is annoying, which is a perfectly good takeaway for a 10 year old. It’s not my job to stuff my opinions into his feedback form.
Over the past few months, I’ve worked out a few small, easy things that work for us, that don’t take a lot of time and don’t end up with me writing the whole thing. First, I always start by telling him that the feedback form isn’t graded. Ms. Riley doesn’t mark it right or wrong, she just reads it to get to know how his brain works when he works on projects. I also tell him I fill out feedback forms for my job all the time, and I always write the bad parts along with the good, that’s just how it works. Second, I never give him answers to write. I just ask specific questions that pull out his actual memories: what did you talk about at dinner this week related to this? what part made you the most frustrated? what part was the most fun? That gets a real answer way faster than telling him what to write. Third, I let him write as little as he wants. A one-sentence answer is fine. If he only wants to write one word, that’s okay too. The teacher would rather have a real short answer than a fake long one.
A week after he turned in the solar system project, he brought the feedback form back home with a note from Ms. Riley next to his glue line: Great point! I keep extra strong glue in the art cabinet for all our projects next semester. Leo held it up to me like he’d won an award, and I could see why. For the first time, his actual, unedited answer was good enough.
I still catch myself leaning in sometimes, ready to fix a wording or add a “better” takeaway. Last week, he brought home a feedback form for his book report where he wrote this book was boring except the part with the dog. I almost told him to rephrase it to sound nicer. But I stopped. It’s his feedback, not mine. Some forms are messy, some have short answers, none are perfect. That’s the point. The practice of thinking about your own work, of naming what worked and what didn’t in your own words, is worth way more than a perfect polished form any day.
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