I used to hand back papers covered in comments. There might be a question in the margin, a note about the evidence, an arrow showing where the reasoning jumped too quickly, and several corrections squeezed between the lines. I had spent a huge amount of time trying to help. Then I would watch a student glance at the grade, put the paper into a folder, and move on with life.
This is one of the oldest frustrations in teaching, and AI has not made it go away. It has simply made it possible to generate much more feedback, much more quickly. A tool can now comment on every sentence, identify a dozen weaknesses, suggest stronger wording, and produce a cleaner version almost instantly. That sounds like progress until we ask the uncomfortable question: What did the student actually do with any of it?
Feedback is not valuable because it exists. It becomes valuable when a student understands it, decides what to do, makes a meaningful change, and can carry some part of that learning into the next piece of work.
More comments are not necessarily more help
Imagine being fourteen years old and receiving a page filled with advice about your claim, organization, evidence, transitions, grammar, tone, and sentence structure. Even if every comment is accurate, the total effect may be paralyzing. The student has not been given a next move. The student has been given a catalog of everything that is wrong.
I would rather identify the one or two things that matter most right now. Maybe the student has evidence but has not explained how it supports the claim. Maybe the paragraph contains three ideas and needs to decide which one it is really about. Maybe the student understands the concept but keeps skipping a step in the calculation. A focused question gives the student somewhere to put their attention.
That does not mean every piece of feedback must be vague or gentle. Sometimes students need direct instruction. Sometimes they need to see a model, review a strategy, or hear plainly that a part of the work is not yet doing what it needs to do. The point is to make the feedback usable, not merely abundant.
Leave the student with a decision
Good feedback should return responsibility to the student. What do you think the reader needs to understand here? Which example gives you the strongest support? Where does your reasoning need another step? What are you going to change, and why?
A student should also be able to disagree. Feedback is not a command from an oracle, whether it comes from a teacher or an AI system. A student may have a reason for making a choice that is not obvious on the page. Asking the student to evaluate the feedback, rather than simply obey it, turns revision into an act of judgment.
This is especially important with AI-generated feedback. The language can sound confident even when the suggestion does not fit the assignment, the rubric, or the student's actual intention. Students need practice deciding whether advice is useful, incomplete, or simply wrong. That is part of learning to work intelligently with AI, and it is part of becoming a stronger writer or thinker more generally.
Come back later
A revision can tell us that the original piece of work changed. It cannot, by itself, tell us whether the student learned something durable. Perhaps the student understood the feedback and used it thoughtfully. Perhaps the tool rewrote the sentence and the student clicked accept. On the finished page, those two processes might look exactly the same.
The stronger evidence comes later. Can the student notice the same problem in a new paragraph? Can they explain the strategy without being reminded? Can they apply it in another subject or on another kind of assignment? If the same support is available, do they need less of it?
This is another problem I want Coach to take seriously. The goal should not be to cover a student's work with impressive feedback or make every draft shine as quickly as possible. The goal should be to give students feedback they can use, preserve their responsibility for the revision, and then look for signs that the learning travels with them.
A better-looking paragraph is useful. A student who knows how and why to make the next paragraph better is much more useful.