Week 4: How to communicate feedback teachers find respectful and useful
Instructional Walks: The First Four Weeks
This is the final email to help you get started with instructional walks, the primary practice in my new book. You can access the prior three weeks’ posts at the end of this one. On Thursday, September 29, join Regie Routman and me for a virtual chat about literacy leadership. I will also share an overview of the Reading by Example community of practice.
-Matt
In this final week, we will learn:
how trust, clarity, and affirmation support effective feedback,
what respectful and useful feedback is and is not, and
a sentence stem you can use to support teachers’ thinking.
The larger goal is developing teachers to become leaders of their own learning, who in turn support students to become “self-determining learners” (Routman, 2014).
The Situational Nature of Instruction
As shared in a previous post, feedback is only as effective as how well a teacher/colleague hears it and then applies that information to their practice.
The traditional thinking around feedback is to get it right through more technical approaches, such as specificity, alignment with standards and school expectations, etc.
There’s nothing wrong with a technical approach. But the problem with this thinking is, we as leaders didn’t do all the necessary work ahead of time to:
Learn about each teacher and their context (trust),
Create clarity around your school’s reality and goals (priority), and
First noticing and naming what’s going well (affirmations).
Instruction does not exist in a vacuum; it’s highly situational.
To take into account the contextual nature of instruction, consider the following three steps for more effective feedback in the future.
Step #1 - When you feel the urge to share feedback, first assume you are wrong.
Why? Because there’s around a 50% chance that you are.
The reason is, it’s likely you have not been in the classroom with enough frequency and duration to have a more comprehensive understanding of the teachers’ & students’ goals, or their prior learning experiences.
Hitting “pause” on the urge to communicate feedback frees you up to keep learning.
Step #2 - Look for alignment (or lack thereof) between your instructional framework and teaching.
This is not judgment.
It’s about observing today’s instruction (current state) in relation to what we are striving for in terms of schoolwide aspirations and goals (future state).
To document instruction, I write a rich description of the classroom experience:
What teachers are saying and doing
What students are saying and doing
The environment, e.g. student work posted, anchor charts, etc.
Documenting this information objectively - just the facts - gives teachers and leaders a better understanding of instructional practice and it’s impact on student learning.
Step #3 - Avoid giving advice or suggestions (pseudo-feedback) and start asking questions.
I try to think of myself not as an influencer but rather as a learner. I want to first put myself in the shoes of the teacher and understand their thinking behind their decision making, plus what challenges they might be experiencing and/or topics to discuss.
For example, let’s say I have noticed a pattern of using worksheets during the literacy block. (I reviewed what I documented from the 1st and 2nd rounds of walks.)
I might ask how things are going with the current literacy curriculum.
They might share that they felt they needed to scaffold the resource for their learners with templates for organizing students’ ideas.
I could acknowledge their positive intentions, followed by asking what impact they’ve noticed so far with students since using them.
What I am trying to do is to create awareness.
And now I have a renewed focus - the impact of the added resource on student learning - as I continue to come in, observe instruction, and hold conversations.
Remember What Matters: Relationships
As leaders, we can get wrapped up in trying to improve instruction, that we focus more on performance instead of the people. When we come together around the practice, it’s always within the context of the person who believes they are effective in their work. From this perspective, we can better understand realistic next steps.
Try This: A Two Sentence Frame
Take an element from what you documented during your visit and frame it using these two sentences (h/t Ron Lott):
“Here is what I noticed…(data)”
“What are your perceptions?”
This feedback is respectful and useful because it:
Communicates to the teacher information about instruction,
Gives them an opportunity to reflect upon it, and
Offer more information about what was noticed back to me.
Feedback is not a one-way street. It’s a conversation to support understanding. These interactions should feel reciprocal instead of a hierarchical process.
When we create the conditions for teachers (and leaders) to objectively see current instruction, we can use that information to make collective growth toward goals.
🙌 Congratulations on completing the first four weeks of instructional walks! Let us know what your biggest win was in September, or share an insight from this experience.
Do you want to continue with this work? Join us for Thursday’s Zoom chat (see below to register). I will be sharing information on how to access the new community to explore more resources, strategies and support for teaching and leading literacy in your context.
Instructional Walks Email Course Outline
Week 1: How daily classroom visits can build trust with faculty
Week 2: How to see literacy instruction through a learning (vs. judgment) lens
Week 4: How to communicate feedback teachers find respectful and useful
“The feedback students give is just as important as the feedback they get.”
― Cris Tovani
Celebration Zoom Call with Regie Routman
Join me on Thursday, September 29, 2022 at 6 P.M. CST for a live video conversation with Regie Routman, author of Read, Write, Lead: Breakthrough Strategies for Schoolwide Literacy Success and many other books.
We want to celebrate your first four weeks of instructional walks! I will also ask Regie to share her wisdom on becoming a literacy leader.
In addition, I will be giving a preview overview of our new community of practice, where you can keep your journey as a literacy leader going with a group of colleagues.
The community will guide you to:
Engage in a brief inquiry around a question or source of tension in your work.
Expand on this inquiry by setting up a student-centered equity project.
Express your findings with the broader educational community.
Sign up by Wednesday to learn more!