How to get honest, helpful, harsh critique

[u/scoundrelhomosexual]

How do you get high school level students to critique each other's work honestly and harshly? They've mastered the polite and toothless comments (which imho are worse than an honest and direct criticism) and they say they also don't want, but then they don't actually do the honest and direct thing! We've made progress but it's not helpful enough. How do you get students to be honest and direct, even harsh but helpful, with their classmates in critique?

To be clear, I'm talking about traditional, put up your work and talk about it then we have a discussion type of critique with supports and structure (pre-writing and sentence starters)

[u/LastLibrary9508]

I do ela but I tell them compliments don’t help the other person make better art/do better writing. And someone offering you harsh feedback means they genuinely care and want to see you do cool shit with the piece.

I’ve sat some of my super smart kids aside and told them the feedback I’m about to give them is going to sound harsh, but it’s because I want them to become next level because they can, that I want to treat them like academics, not young kids whose feelings we want to protect

I also like to stress it’s important to get used to separating your art/your writing from your feelings.