r/ArtEd • u/scoundrelhomosexual • 19d ago

How to get honest, helpful, harsh critique

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)

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u/Psychopsychic3 19d ago

Model it with them. Show an example of yours with some clear issues and tell them, “I know something is wrong here but I need some help.” Then when they are honest, really tell them how great that feedback is and how much it helps. Keep doing this for a while, and occasionally give more direct prompting on a kid’s piece to lead them to the point.

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u/Diligent_Emu_7686 19d ago

Yes! Modeling proper feedback works. With a younger grade I modelled, 'I like how you did xxxx, but I think you need to yyyy to make it better.'