Still Working On It: Feedback, AI, and the Conversations Faculty Want

"...still working on it."

A teacher tacked those words onto the end of a sentence about feedback, as last year came to a close. The full line was "GOA is sharpening my ability to modulate feedback, making it both rigorous and humane," and then, tacked on, the admission.

This piece looks back at 2025-26 in order to look forward and draws from 40 responses to the Faculty Climate Survey and 46 end-of-semester checkout reflections. Read together, they show that the areas faculty named as hard are the same areas they named as the reason they teach here.

The two growth edges below came up more than any others, and they turn out to be the same problem in different clothes: making student thinking visible, to students and to other faculty.

"I would love to have a better sense of how students are using AI and how to encourage the friction of critical thinking." —GOA Faculty Member

Many faculty named AI in their end of term reflections. What stands out is how many teachers are responding to AI by redesigning rather than policing. One inverted the usual workflow: students draft first, AI organizes after, and students then reflect on what the AI missed. Another cut the number of slides required in a research task and asked for more interpretation on each one, so the work could not be assembled without a person doing the thinking. A third teacher added short oral check-ins to find the gap between what a submission claimed and what a student could explain aloud.

This is what GOA's Educator Growth Framework calls Design for Understanding, where content expertise meets pedagogical skill: assessments built to reveal disciplinary thinking rather than recall. None of these teachers made the task easier. They made the thinking harder to skip.

Try this: pick one assignment you already have suspicions about. What changes if students show you the thinking before the product, or explain the finished product aloud for two minutes?

"I spend a lot of time on [feedback] and never know if students are seeing them."

Feedback was the weakest satisfaction item in our faculty climate survey, and the reflections explain the plateau. Faculty are investing heavily without knowing what comes of their feedback. One teacher sustained 150 to 200 words per major submission across nearly 40 students. Another recorded voice memos tied to the growth goal each student named at the start of the semester, and could point to students echoing that language back in their own writing. A third stopped assuming students knew where feedback lived and taught a short lesson on finding and answering Canvas comments.

The most useful reflection in the set was a self-critique. A teacher who had built task-specific rubrics with proficiency descriptors for every assignment wrote: "The limitation is that those rubrics existed only for me. Students were being graded against criteria they could not see in advance. That is the clearest next step." 

That sits in Responsive Design, where structure meets empathy. The rubric was rigorous. It just was not visible.

Try this: take one rubric you already use and ask whether a student could predict their score from it before submitting. If not, what is the smallest piece of it you could hand over?

Both growth edges point the same direction. Making thinking visible to students, through tasks that require it and criteria they can see, depends on faculty making their own thinking visible to each other. Few in this data asked to be told what to do about AI or feedback. Teachers were asking how other colleagues are working through these challenges.

The loudest request in the end of year survey was for teachers to have time to talk with each other about their practice. And our GOA faculty were specific about why it matters: "The network of really driven educational professionals that I get to know makes the GOA experience amazing." That is a strong place to build from. The opportunity this year is to make more room for the conversations faculty want and need to have.