Feedback is critical for helping students enhance their conceptual knowledge and skills. Despite its value, with the time constraints and the large number of students in classrooms, providing focused, actionable, and timely feedback often feels unattainable. Feedback is an essential yet time-intensive task that artificial intelligence (AI) can effectively scale, ensuring every student receives the targeted support they need to confidently apply their learning.
Qualities of Effective Feedback
To harness feedback’s full potential to improve student learning, it’s essential to understand what makes it truly effective. Grant Wiggins wrote an article for ASCD that identifies the qualities of high-quality feedback.
Wiggins says the best feedback is:
- Goal-oriented or referenced: Feedback should clarify the goals of the assignment or task, guiding students toward a clear desired result or outcome.
- Tangible and transparent: Effective feedback is clear and easily understood from a student’s perspective. It avoids language that might confuse learners.
- Actionable: Feedback must provide concrete steps students can take to improve their work.
- User-friendly: Feedback should challenge students appropriately without overwhelming them.
- Timely: Feedback is most powerful when delivered as students work or soon after the task, allowing students to act on it as soon as possible.
- Ongoing: Regular feedback routines ensure that students receive continuous guidance, motivating students to continually improve.
- Consistent: Consistency in feedback, supported by rubrics, helps align student understanding with the learning objectives and expectations.
Since the most effective feedback is actionable, timely, and ongoing, AI presents an exciting pathway to reimagine how we support students as they work in classrooms and create more balance for teachers. That’s why I was excited to learn about Class Companion, an AI tool created to coach students while they are working through assignments and to provide focused feedback on work in progress. The company’s mission statement states, “You strive to do everything you can for students, but there are only 24 hours in the day. Our mission is to defy that limit.” Since the overarching theme of my podcast, The Balance, is to help teachers strive for a healthier balance in relation to this important work, I invited Avery Pan, CEO of Class Companion, to join me for an episode of The Balance.
Highlights of Our Conversation
In our conversation, Avery highlights two things that AI can do very quickly that are beyond our capacity as humans. First, AI can think very quickly. She points out that AI doesn’t do better thinking than the teacher, but it has the advantage of not getting tired. AI can analyze unlimited amounts of student writing or data and generate rapid responses consistently, something that would be exhausting, if not impossible, for any human.
Second, AI excels at managing and tracking detailed assessment criteria across many students over time. This allows for seamless monitoring of assessment data and student progress, creating a comprehensive view of each student’s conceptual knowledge and skills. This is simply beyond a single teacher’s capacity to do when they have classes of 30+ students.
Class Companion operates “under the guidance of a teacher,” as Avery emphasizes. The partnership between teachers and AI is crucial in ensuring that AI-driven coaching and feedback are aligned with key standards and skills, all while boosting student confidence and motivation. Teachers still play a central role, inputting assignments, selecting or creating rubrics, and determining how many attempts a student has to submit an answer. These attempts are supported by the AI coaching function that can help students think more deeply about questions and develop their answers.
Candace Baker, an educator using Class Companion, said, “I realized the kids have no problem copying down a definition. But when it comes to finding examples and then explaining the example, they had no idea how to do that. They would just repeat the definition. That’s not deep enough…After the very first time my students used [Class Companion], they were like, that was amazing….When I got their vocab back, it went from being two-word responses to being paragraphs that were great explanations. I was so excited. I was so happy. They got immediate feedback to help them dig deeper and see how far they needed to go with their explanations without me staying hours and hours after school and before school, meeting with them 1:1.” The impact of this coaching and support is profound for students working through challenging tasks.
AI can amplify the teacher’s capacity to provide consistent, personalized support in a way that is simply unattainable in a traditional classroom setting.
From Subjective to Objective: The Benefit of AI Feedback
When I work with teachers, a common concern they express is how feedback will be received by students. Many worry that students might see feedback as purely negative, focusing on what’s wrong with their work rather than how they can improve. This concern is understandable, as feedback can sometimes feel subjective, and students may perceive it as personal criticism.
However, when feedback is delivered through an AI tool like Class Companion, it shifts the dynamic. It creates a feedback loop that feels more objective and less personal. This approach helps create a feedback loop that feels supportive, focusing on growth and improvement rather than just pointing out mistakes. By removing the human element, AI can deliver feedback that students are more likely to see as constructive, helping them engage more positively with the learning process.
Class Companion: How It Works
First, teachers can sign up for a free account. Premium plans are also available for districts. Class Companion connects directly with Google Classroom, so teachers can select the Google Classrooms they want to connect with.
Once Class Companion and Google Classroom are synced, a teacher can create an assignment in Class Companion, copying and pasting assignments directly into the program. Teachers can attach images and select an available standards-aligned rubric or create their own. They decide how many attempts students will have to submit a correct answer. Then they click publish, and the assignment will appear in Google Classroom for students!
As students navigate the assignment, they can turn to the AI coaching tool for questions and support. The AI is designed to distinguish between genuine inquiries about the task and attempts to simply get the answers. Its primary goal is to guide students in thinking critically and working through the assignment with the right level of assistance.
If you want to see these steps in action, watch the video below, where Avery provides a brief overview of Class Companion!
Wrap Up
Feedback is a cornerstone of effective teaching, playing a crucial role in supporting individual student growth, increasing motivation, and fostering a growth mindset. However, providing timely, actionable, and ongoing feedback in a classroom full of students is a significant challenge. As educators, we must find sustainable ways to deliver the kind of feedback that truly makes a difference in students’ learning journeys.
By integrating AI tools like Class Companion, we can extend our capacity to provide personalized support as students work through assignments. AI helps us deliver feedback that is not only consistent and objective but also immediate and targeted, meeting students where they are in their learning process. This approach allows us to maintain high standards of teaching while ensuring that every student receives the attention and guidance they need to succeed. Julissa Bohannon, a teacher using Class Companion says of her students, “I have seen a lot of growth and buy-in from my students who have told me, they never felt like they could become good writers. Them seeing their scores from day to day, and seeing their own growth with a rubric and feedback, has helped boost my students’ confidence.”
As we embrace these AI-powered innovations to reimagine time-consuming workflows, we can cultivate a classroom environment where each student is motivated to grow, confident in their abilities, and prepared to tackle challenges with resilience and determination.
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