Redefining Teacher–Learner Roles for Deeper Learning.

During the most recent episode of Edventure Training Series: Feedback that Works!, teacher-trainer Babette Dolfin used a Dutch proverb that landed with both laughter and recognition: “Put the sweat on the right back—the students should be sweating, not you.” The point was not provocation, but rather pedagogy: when learners carry the cognitive load—planning, producing, judging quality, and acting on feedback—learning becomes visible, transferable, and durable.

From Teaching to Coaching: Moving the Work to the Learner

The shift “from teaching to coaching” –  designing sequences of small, low-stakes performances where learners show progress against explicit outcomes, receive information-rich feedback, and iterate before any high-stakes judgment – is a process that proved to change my classes as well when I understood and implemented that.

This is further supported by formative assessment literature, where the everyday use of evidence about learning—by teachers and students—to adapt teaching and studying has consistently been linked to higher achievement (Black & Wiliam’s landmark synthesis).

The goal clarity Babette emphasizes (“know exactly what you want from your students”) aligns with the design principles behind assessment for learning: learners need transparent criteria, models of quality, and frequent opportunities to compare their work against those standards.

Feedback that Feeds Forward—and Who Should Give It

Understanding the difference between “feedback” and “criticism” has proven essential in my development as a teacher, but this is definitely (as hard it is to accomplish) just the first step. Who should be giving feedback, when, and how often? Feedback’s impact depends less on who speaks and more on what information moves learning forward and who uses it to regulate next steps. High-information feedback—timely, specific, actionable—produces consistently positive effects, but only when learners are positioned to act on it.

Critically, Babette pushes feedback work onto students: they learn to give feedback using the same criteria the teacher will apply. That socializes learners into standards, sharpens their judgment, and—importantly—lightens teacher load without lowering rigor.

This is strongly supported by Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick’s model of feedback for self-regulated learning, which argues that good feedback designs close three gaps: between current and desired performance, between strategy use and task demands, and between self-beliefs and efficacy—gaps students themselves must help to close.

“Prove Why You’re Passing”: Rebalancing Cognitive and Emotional Load

A second provocation from Babette—“Students should prove why they’re passing, not teachers why they’re failing.”—reframes the affective economy of classrooms. It swaps teacher anxiety (over-marking, over-explaining) for learner agency (self-monitoring, evidencing progress).

Large-scale syntheses (such as the one of John Hattie) suggest feedback’s mean effects are substantial but variable; much depends on whether learners use feedback to select strategies, seek help, or revise work, thus reaching self-regulated learning. Well-designed tasks that require students to plan, monitor, and evaluate their own work are therefore not an “extra,” but the very mechanism by which feedback produces gains.

Programmatic Assessment: Many Small Steps, One Big Picture

What Babette called a “programmatic approach” is well developed in professional and medical education. Rather than a single high-stakes exam “surprising” everyone at term’s end, programmatic assessment aggregates many low-stakes datapoints, each carrying rich qualitative feedback, and periodically rolls them up into a defensible decision. For learning, this reduces performance pressure, increases feedback volume, and—crucially—forces learners to gather and be aware of evidence of growth over time.

One can put this into practice this with bite-sized, authentic tasks and especially pass/fail checkpoints—so the cognitive load stays on analysis, production, and revision rather than point-collecting. Learners know outcomes, show evidence, and reflect (“How do you know you can use the past perfect? Where is your evidence?”). This, for me, was the point that I took in the most and that shifted a long-standing paradigm from “I need to always create activities that prove my students are in control of certain concepts/ideas” to “creating the environment in which students prove themselves (through portfolio work, movie transcripts, actual use of language) that they learned”.

Practical Design Moves (Grounded in Research and Practice)

1. Make outcomes and exemplars public. Show what “good” looks like; co-construct success criteria. Learners can’t carry the work without a map.
2. Design activities/entire lessons for peer feedback as learning. Give students your rubric; train them to use it on sample and live work; require a revision plan that references peer comments.
3. Shift from correction to decisions. Replace “here’s what’s wrong” with “what’s your next move and why?”—a classic feed-forward prompt that cultivates regulation
4. Chunk assessment programmatically. Replace one big judgment with many small evidence-gathering tasks + periodic discussions (
5. Use pass/fail gates to protect cognition. Reduce grade-chasing; insist on evidence, reflection, and revision cycles before any summative decision
6. Ask Babette’s question in conferences: “Who’s sweating here?” If it’s you, redesign the task so students must retrieve, compare, judge, and decide.

If your lessons leave you exhausted while learners remain passive, the research and Babette’s practice agree: it’s a role problem, not a rigor problem. In short: move the intellectual work to the learner—on purpose and every day. The sweat will be on the right back, and the learning will be better for it.

References and further recommended reading on the topic:

1. Black, P., & Wiliam, D. Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment.
2. Double, K. S., McGrane, J. A., & Hopfenbeck, T. N. (2020). The Impact of Peer Assessment on Academic Performance: A Meta-analysis of Control Group Studies.
3. Hattie, J. (2008). Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. (overview and excerpts).
4. Nicol, D., & Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006). Formative Assessment and Self-Regulated Learning: A Model and Seven Principles of Good Feedback Practice.
5. Wisniewski, B., Zierer, K., & Hattie, J. (2020). The Power of Feedback Revisited: A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Feedback in Educational Contexts.