How should I display a list of items with different statuses?

I'm working on a web based platform that is about asking for, giving and getting feedback on assignments. When requesting feedback, your request is parsed as an item in a table where you can see a status of this feedback. The table contains 3 different columns - status of feedback, #tag and date of last creation (if the item gets updated). When requesting feedback, the status is "Waiting for feedback". The different statuses include also "Received and unread feedback", "Read feedback", "Feedback given & sent" (you can also give feedback if someone request for you to do that).

Now the problem is that there isn't really any differentiation between statuses besides some pastel colors, which are hard to understand, especially when the table has many items. How should I make such table more comprehensible? Colors, icons, prioritization, fonts? Or perhaps completely another approach e.g. something similar to a Kanban board?

P.S. In near future there will be a feature of adding different classrooms, so perhaps also a differentiation and filtering based on a classroom should be taken into account?