  One way to foster a supportive culture in physics departments is for
instructors to provide students with personal attention regarding their
academic difficulties. To this end, we have developed the Guided Reflection
Form (GRF), an online tool that facilitates student reflections and
personalized instructor responses. In the present work, we report on the
experiences and practices of two instructors who used the GRF in an
introductory physics lab course. Our analysis draws on two sources of data: (i)
post-semester interviews with both instructors and (ii) the instructors'
written responses to 134 student reflections. Interviews focused on the
instructors' perceptions about the goals and framing of the GRF activity, and
characteristics of good or bad feedback. Their GRF responses were analyzed for
the presence of up to six types of statement: encouraging statements,
normalizing statements, empathizing statements, strategy suggestions, resource
suggestions, and feedback to the student on the structure of their reflection.
We find that both instructors used all six response types, in alignment with
their perceptions of what counts as good feedback. This exploratory qualitative
investigation demonstrates that the GRF can serve as a mechanism for
instructors to pay personal attention to their students. In addition, it opens
the door to future work about the impact of the GRF on student-teacher
interactions.
