Timely, targeted, and specific formative feedback is essential to students' progress and development. As a teacher, it can be challenging to highlight the importance of this to students, and to engage them in the this powerful process. In particular, peer feedback is something that students sometimes view as a make-work-project without fully empathizing with why we do it.

Recently, I've started to share the video "Austin's Butterfly" with students to help frame for them the power of formative feedback. The reactions are always surprising as students follow along adn empathize with Austin's journey. Though the age of Austin and the students in the video is much younger than that of our MYP middle school girls, it is still a powerful teaching tool to introduce the how, and in particular the why of the role fo formative feedback.