Report Card Comment Prompt

What this prompt does

A report card comment prompt expands the shorthand you already keep on each student — one strength with an example, one thing to work on with an example, one habit worth naming — into a comment a parent can read at the kitchen table and act on by Monday. You supply the evidence. The prompt supplies the sentences and keeps them under the character limit. It never supplies the student.

Thirty comments at five hundred characters each is a fifteen-thousand-character essay written in thirty voices, and the thinking is the fast part. Most teachers can say what a student did this term in ten seconds out loud. The slow part is the twelfth "is a pleasure to have in class" of the evening — the sentence bank you swore off in September, back in your hands because the deadline is tomorrow. This prompt takes the ten seconds of speech and does the typing.

Two neighbours sit close to this page, and the line between them is the reader. The reference letter prompt argues for one student to a stranger who's deciding something — an admissions reader, a scholarship panel — and you write it once. A report card comment reports to a family that already knows the child, and you write one for every child in the room. The rubric generator prompt is the other cousin: it grades the work. This one describes the learner.

The prompt

Write a report card comment from my notes below. Use ONLY the evidence I give you — do not invent examples, achievements, or difficulties.

**Subject and grade:** [e.g. "Grade 6 English Language Arts"]
**Student:** [STUDENT] — use this placeholder instead of a name, and use [he/she/they] as the pronoun
**Reporting period:** [e.g. "Term 1 progress report" or "final report"]
**Strength, with one example:** [e.g. "backs opinions with quotes from the text in book club; cited three passages in the last discussion"]
**Area to grow, with one example:** [e.g. "paragraph responses run on — ideas are strong but sentences don't stop; comma splices in the last two written responses"]
**Habit or contribution worth naming:** [e.g. "volunteers to read aloud; asks questions that move the discussion forward"]
**Character limit:** [e.g. 500 characters including spaces]
**Tone:** [e.g. "warm, direct, no jargon"]

Rules:
- Order: what [STUDENT] has learned or does well (with my example), then the area to grow (with my example), then ONE next step, then the habit.
- The next step must be a concrete action the student can take and a family can support at home, in one sentence — not "continue to develop skills."
- Plain language a parent understands. Do not use curriculum-standard wording, education jargon, or grade-level codes.
- If any required element is missing from my notes, write [VERIFY: what's needed] in its place rather than filling it in.
- No comparisons to other students. No labels, diagnoses, or guesses about why the student behaves as they do — describe what I observed, nothing more.
- Stay under the character limit. Give the character count at the end.
- No exclamation marks, no "pleasure to have in class," no sentence that could apply to any student.

How to use it

1. Write the shorthand first, in your own words, before you open the chat. Three lines per student — strength plus example, growth area plus example, one habit — from your gradebook and whatever you remember about the term. That's the part only you can do, and it takes ten seconds per child once you stop trying to write sentences.
2. Keep the names out. [STUDENT] and a pronoun choice are all the model needs, and they're all it should get. Your district's policy decides which tools are approved for student data; the placeholder rule keeps you inside it with any of them. Swap the real name in after you paste the comment into your reporting system.
3. Give it the real character limit. Most reporting systems cap a comment somewhere between 300 and 1,000 characters, and a comment that runs 40 over gets cut mid-sentence — right where the next step lives. The count the model prints at the end is a claim. Measure it in your reporting tool before you move on.
4. Read the next step as the parent would. If a family can't tell what to do with it on a weeknight, it isn't a next step yet. Send the comment back with "make the next step something a parent can do at home in 10 minutes."

Example output

Inputs: Grade 6 English Language Arts, final report; [STUDENT], she/her; strength: backs opinions with quotes from the text in book club, cited three passages in the last discussion; area to grow: paragraph responses run on — ideas are strong but sentences don't stop, comma splices in the last two written responses; habit: volunteers to read aloud, asks questions that move the discussion forward; limit 500 characters; tone warm and direct.

[STUDENT] reads closely and argues from the text: in book club she supports her opinions with quotes, citing three passages in our last discussion. In her written paragraphs the ideas are strong, but the sentences run together — her last two responses joined separate thoughts with commas. Her next step is to read each finished paragraph aloud at home and put a full stop wherever she pauses for breath. She volunteers to read aloud and asks questions that move the whole group forward.

(487 characters)

One strength with proof, one growth area with proof, a next step a parent can run at the kitchen table, one habit. Nothing in the comment could be pasted under another student's name, and nothing in it came from anywhere but the teacher's three lines.

Variations

The class set

"Here are notes for 8 students, one block each, same format as above. Write all 8 comments. Vary the opening words and sentence structure across the set so no two comments start the same way, and never reuse a phrase between students."

Run the class in batches of eight to ten rather than thirty at once — the model holds the variety rule better over a short set, and you can read eight comments carefully in the time it takes to skim thirty.

The progress report

"This is a mid-term progress report, not a final report. Describe progress toward this term's expectations — what [STUDENT] is doing now compared with September — rather than achievement, and make the next step something that can show results before the final report."

The hard one

"[STUDENT] is struggling this term. Lead with the strength anyway — it's real — then describe the difficulty with my example only. The next step must be small enough to succeed at. Do not speculate about causes and do not suggest what the difficulty might mean."

A comment about a struggling student is where the no-guessing rule earns its place. If you suspect something beyond a rough term, that belongs in a conversation with your student-support team and the family — not in a 500-character box.

Common pitfalls

• Don't paste a name or any other detail that identifies the child. The comment reads exactly as well with [STUDENT] in it, and the placeholder means your chat history holds nothing you'd need to explain later.
• Don't let the model manufacture the example. "Shows strong understanding of fractions" is the kind of line it will produce unprompted, and a parent who asks "which fractions?" at the interview deserves a real answer. Every [VERIFY] flag marks a sentence you either have evidence for or should cut.
• Don't accept curriculum-speak. Ontario's assessment policy, Growing Success, tells teachers writing report card comments to "focus on what students have learned, describe significant strengths, and identify next steps for improvement," in "language that parents will understand" rather than wording that "simply repeats" the curriculum expectations (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2010, p. 65). If a draft says "demonstrates a developing ability to construct meaning," send it back.
• Don't produce thirty comments in one voice. The same policy asks school boards not to stop teachers from writing personalized comments instead of picking from a prepared set — and a batch that opens every comment with "[STUDENT] has shown" is a comment bank with extra steps. The class-set variation's variety rule exists for this.
• Don't let a comment become a verdict. Hattie and Timperley's review of the feedback research, The Power of Feedback, found feedback to be among the most powerful influences on achievement and found its effect can run negative depending on the type and how it's given (Review of Educational Research, 2007). A comment that describes what happened and names a next step is feedback. A comment that sums a child up is a grade in sentence form.

Who uses this prompt

• Elementary and middle school teachers: thirty comments across several subjects, three times a year. The shorthand takes an evening — the sentences used to take the weekend. More in prompts for teachers.
• Secondary subject teachers: a hundred and fifty students and a 300-character box each. The goal setting prompt pairs well here — hand the next step to the student in January and turn it into a goal they own.
• Teachers writing in a second language: the evidence is yours; the prompt handles the register. Read every comment aloud once before you submit it.

ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini all run this prompt unmodified. It leans on the plainest advice in Anthropic's prompting best practices: treat the model as a brilliant new colleague who lacks your context, and be explicit about what you want. Your context is the three lines of evidence. The explicit part is everything the comment isn't allowed to do. The child on the page is still the one you taught, which is the only reason a parent will believe a word of it.