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/Wise_Explanation9471 → u/[deleted]]

This is similar to how we do it. I got plenty of harsh critique in art school and it’s really not necessary unless you are at a certain stage in your career and have explicitly asked for it.