TEN QUESTIONS

The Low-Hanging Fruit
In Leverage Leadership, Paul Bambrick-Santoyo describes a robust model for providing feedback to help teachers make rapid improvements. His model involves intensive cycles of observations, post-observation meetings to identify changes the teacher should make, and follow-up observations to create accountability for making the agreed-upon changes.

SUGGESTIONS:

• During a brief 5-minute walkthrough, it’s easy to simply miss parts of the lesson that would alleviate a certain suggestion, or to misjudge the effectiveness of a particular aspect of the lesson. When suggestions are based on insufficient information, they can give the observer a false sense of accomplishment, while frustrating or misleading the teacher.

FEEDBACK:

• When feedback puts teachers in a role of passive compliance, it removes the greatest opportunities for professional growth. In this case, accurate or not, feedback can become an distraction from bigger opportunities for improvement. For example, if a teacher is working on an ambitious new lesson, but the observer’s feedback focuses on one aspect, an opportunity has been missed. Similarly, many teachers have been conditioned to listen and obey, rather than to reflect and grow.

GROWTH:

• When feedback is a one-way transfer of expertise from observer to teacher, it limits the opportunity for instructional leaders to continue to grow. Our greatest resources for professional growth are the teachers we supervise, who can challenge us to think more deeply about teaching and learning, and can push us beyond our personal experience in the classroom.

Try these structures next time you share feedback with a teacher:

“I noticed that you [ ]...could you talk to me about how that fits within this lesson or unit?”

“Here’s what I saw: [ ] ...is that what you thought was happening at the time?”

“I noticed that [ ] ...how did you feel about how that went?”

“I noticed that students [ ] ...how did that compare with what you had expected to happen when you planned the lesson?”

“I saw that [ ] ...what did you think of that, and what do you plan to do tomorrow?”

“At one point in the lesson, it seemed like [ ] ...did it seem that way to you, too? What was your take?”

“Tell me about when you [ ] ...what made you choose that response?”

“I noticed that [ ] ...could you tell me about what led up to that, perhaps in an earlier lesson?”

“I found myself wondering if [ ] ...is that something you’re thinking about?”

"What effect did you think it had when you [ ]?"

Notice a theme here?
Good feedback begins with noticing various aspects of the lesson, and sharing those observations with the teacher as starting points for discussion.

When we share evidence-based feedback, then stop talking and listen, we can have a far greater impact on teaching practice than if we’re too quick to make suggestions.

BEYOND SUGGESTIONS:

• I believe that deep conversations about instruction create the best context for professional growth for both the observer and the teacher.
• These conversations are best begun with an evidence-based discussion of what actually happened in the lesson, because feedback is fundamentally about returning information to its source for reflection & re-processing.

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