By Yuting Huo and Kateryna Hrynchuk, Feedback Engagement Fellows 2025–26
After reflecting on their design approaches in their first blog, in this second blog post, Feedback Engagement Fellows Yuting Huo and Kateryna Hrynchuk reflect on the workshop design and successes of the project.
Building the Workshop: Three Steps, Three Layers
Based on these findings, we designed a workshop built around the DEFT framework (Knowing–Acting–Being). You can use these three steps right now to turn any comment into a stepping stone for your next assignment:
The DEFT framework (Developing Engagement with Feedback Toolkit, Winstone and Nash 2016) structures feedback literacy across three dimensions. Knowing addresses the problem of understanding what feedback actually means. Acting addresses the problem of translating that understanding into concrete next steps. Being addresses the harder prior problem: engaging with feedback at all when the emotional weight of a grade gets in the way. Our workshop was designed to move through all three, in that order, because skipping any one of them leaves students stuck.
Step 1: Decoding (Knowing) — Translating “Academic Shorthand”
Markers often use short academic phrases that link to marking criteria. To decode these, we use a Feedback Phrase Decoder.
Example: If a marker says your work is “too descriptive”, they mean you spent too much time stating facts and not enough time interpreting why they matter for your argument.
In the workshop, we used a Match-Up Game activity to bring this decoding to life: students paired each vague feedback phrase with its real academic meaning before we revealed the answers. It produced some of the sharpest conversations of the session. Students who had received the same comment had often interpreted it completely differently, and making that visible in a group, before providing the correct mapping, was more effective than any direct explanation we could have given. It also surfaced a real risk: that students tend to remember the critical comments more than the constructive ones, and that those remembered phrases can quietly shape how they understand their own ability. Looking at the language together, objectively, helped shift that.
What Actually Separates 65 from 75
One of the most common questions we received during the Flash Mobs was how to move from a 65 to a 75. Both are strong marks, but the difference between them is in their different relationship to the material.
At 65, a piece of work shows systematic and coherent understanding of the field, clear evidence of critical awareness, and thorough use of evidence. The argument is solid.
At 75, the same criteria are met but at a different depth: analysis is sustained rather than occasional, critical evaluation is strong rather than present, and there is original thinking that challenges mainstream views rather than simply rehearsing them. The gap is not in volume or effort. It is in what the writer does with what they know.
Before the workshop, Yuting and I worked through two sample scripts Lloyd shared with us, placing ourselves in the position of an examiner. That exercise was unexpectedly revealing. Sample 2, the stronger piece, had structural choices that made it consistently clearer to read: an introduction that signalled what the essay would cover and why it mattered, section headings that organised the argument rather than merely labelled it, and referencing that was integrated into the argument rather than stacked at the end of paragraphs. Sample 1 had solid academic sources but a central argument that was not clearly established in the opening, and many of its references gave the impression of literature stacking: present on the page but not visibly connected to how the learning would benefit the writer going forward. The insight that stayed with us, and that students responded to most strongly in the room, is that a 75 is not simply more of a 65. It is a different relationship to the material.
Dr Lloyd Fletcher’s Deep Dive Video To help you visualise this! He breaks down anonymised extracts to show exactly where a 65-mark paper stops and where a 75-mark paper continues to push the boundaries of the argument. Watching this is the best way to see the “marking criteria in action”
Step 2: Fixing (Acting) — The Fix-it Framework
Once you understand the comment, you need a plan. Our Fix-it Framework helps you categorize problems into “buckets” so you can take ONE specific action.
The five buckets are: Too Shallow (surface-level analysis, flagged by words like “superficial” or “lacks depth”); Just Listing (no critical thought, flagged by “no evaluation” or “where is the analysis?”); Weak Evidence (not enough proof, flagged by “need more sources” or “limited reading”); Messy Logic (hard to follow, flagged by “doesn’t flow” or “unclear argument”); and Sloppy and Late (format and habits, flagged by referencing errors or submission issues). For each bucket, the framework suggests one specific action only. Taking one action rather than trying to fix everything at once is a deliberate design choice: it comes from the DEFT Acting strand’s emphasis on identifying a concrete, feasible step rather than an overwhelming improvement plan.
In the session, students worked through the framework with their own feedback, the official marking criteria, and a short worksheet: comment mapped to criterion, criterion mapped to a definition of good performance, definition translated into two or three specific actions for the next submission. The most revealing part was what the exercise showed us about where students actually were. Some had not brought their feedback. Some did not know which marking criteria applied to their module. Some had received comments so vague that decoding work had to happen before any action planning could begin. All of that shaped what we built into the follow-up resources.
Step 3: Accumulating (Being) — Building Your “Feedback Bank”
Feedback isn’t just for one module; it’s a long-term asset. We encourage every student to maintain a Feedback Bank – a personal logbook (digital or paper) to track recurring patterns.
The Method: Log the original comment, its decoded meaning, and the specific action you took.
The Goal: By seeing which “buckets” you fall into most often, you build a “high-score experience library” that you can use to “pre-fix” your work before you even submit your next assignment.
The Feedback Bank worksheet has five columns: the original comment, its decoded meaning, the related marking criterion, two or three actionable next steps, and which future assignment those steps could apply to. That last column is the one that most students skip, and it is the most important. Feedback that is only relevant to the assignment it was written for gets filed and forgotten. Feedback that can transfer across modules and years compounds. The bank is designed to make that transfer visible and deliberate, building what the DEFT framework calls a long-term learning resource rather than a single-use response to one piece of assessed work.
The workshop itself confirmed what the Flash Mobs had suggested: students did not want a simplified version of the guidance. They wanted to understand the reasoning behind it. The 65 to 75 conversation ran much longer than we had scheduled. Students kept pulling at it, asking follow-up questions, sharing their own experiences of feedback that felt arbitrary or inconsistent.
What We Would Do Differently, and What We Learned
Looking back honestly, there are things that went well and things that exposed the limits of what a student-led project can achieve on its own. The workshop itself worked. The Match-Up Game, the 65 to 75 comparison, the Fix-it Framework: students engaged with all of it more seriously than we had expected, and the conversations that ran over time told us something important about how rarely students are given this kind of direct, concrete explanation of what quality actually looks like. That appetite exists. It is not being met by the systems already in place.
But we came in with a more ambitious plan than what we delivered. We had intended to run sessions across both the Business School and SPIS, to produce a repeatable workshop model that tutors could run independently, and to follow up more systematically with students after the session. In practice, the timeline compressed, coordination across programmes was harder than expected.
We also underestimated how much of the work of this kind of project is relationship-building rather than content-building. The conversations with Wayne, Lloyd, and Joe were not just useful background. They were the project. Without Wayne pointing us toward Lloyd, we would not have had a concrete example of the 65 to 75 distinction that was actually credible to students. Without Joe available at every stage, we would have designed something more generic and less grounded. What made the session work is the network of people who were willing to engage with what we were trying to do. That is not something you can plan in a project timeline.
The deeper thing we did not fully anticipate was how personal the feedback question turns out to be for students. When we ran the Flash Mobs, we expected frustration with vague comments. We did not expect students to describe feeling like feedback was written for someone else, or like the criteria were a code they had never been given the key to. It is a problem of trust and transparency between students and the institution, and a ninety-minute workshop can only do so much with it. We left the session feeling that we had opened something we did not have time to close properly. That is an honest assessment, and we think it matters to say it.
If we were starting again, we would spend less time on the design of the materials and more time on building the conditions for the session to land well: earlier and more personal advertising, a committed tutor in the room from the start rather than as a resource to draw on, and a clear follow-up structure that students knew about before they arrived. We would also push harder for the model to be embedded into a module rather than run as a standalone event. A single workshop, however well-designed, reaches a self-selected group. The students who most need this kind of support are rarely the ones who sign up for optional sessions.
Feedback is a tool for improvement. By learning to decode and act on every comment, you take control of your academic journey. Happy writing!
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