- Beginners (6-7 years old): – Learners with low resilience: The goal of the activity: the children should feel safe giving feedback, practice giving positive praise and helpful suggestions. The teacher gives specific examples of how to praise or make suggestions about their peers’ work. The children give short, simple feedback (for example, they highlight one thing they like or make a small suggestion), and the teacher continuously supports their efforts. Feedback is brief and positive, and the teacher helps with appropriate wording, and prompt guiding questions. If a classmate gives critical feedback, or if a child cannot find the right words to express praise, or if a classmate does not accept their suggestion, the teacher provides encouraging feedback. The teacher continuously provides role models and praises the students more than usual in an appropriate manner. In this way, a “culture of praise” and learning from mistake climate is developed in the class.
- Advanced learners (8-9 years old): – Learners with moderate resilience: The aim of the activity is to encourage independent ideas for coping strategies, practice constructive feedback, reinforce the feeling of playing an active role in success, and deal with failure in a resilient way. The children give feedback based on their own experiences and ideas, and the teacher only helps with encouraging questions when necessary (“What would you highlight in your partner’s work?”, “How could you say what else could be added?”). Feedback can be more detailed, covering several points, and children encourage each other. The teacher helps them reflect on their feelings and solutions (“How did you feel when your partner thought differently? What could help you to keep trying?”). The activity promotes the expression of children’s independent ideas, listening to each other, flexible adaptation, and the safe practice of giving feedback.
- Experts (9–10 years old): – Learners with high resilience: The aim of the activity is to promote conscious cooperation, creative problem solving, independent practice of giving and receiving feedback, and independent planning of coping strategies. Children independently develop feedback for more complex works and, if necessary, help their peers in the process of coping strategies. Feedback may include praise, suggestions, and questions that encourage their peers to think („Why did you think that? How could the picture be even more colourful?”). Children experience individual failure and develop solutions consciously: if their feedback misses the mark, they try again in a different way, and if they receive negative feedback on their own work, they try to think through possible changes. The teacher only helps when necessary. They actively follow the process, but the focus is on reflection and reinforcement of the process (“It’s valuable that you worked together and shared your opinions, even if not all suggestions were accepted immediately”).
