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So far in the Instructional Leadership Challenge, I’ve encouraged you to get into classrooms and have feedback conversations with teachers, but not to use forms or give teachers compliments before and after your suggestions in the quote-unquote feedback sandwich.
So you might be wondering, what can I do instead? And isn’t it my job to identify strengths and opportunities for improvement?
Well, here’s the thing. Remember the iceberg metaphor, the idea that teaching is complex professional work, and what we actually see is just a tiny fraction of what’s happening beneath the surface?
The more we comment on what we see, without a full understanding of those hidden aspects of the teacher’s practice, the more likely it’ll be that we take the wrong approach, and give feedback that isn’t helpful. So we need to differentiate our approach to feedback, based on the teacher’s needs, and play one or more of three different roles that you’ll learn about in this section.
Let me give you an example from my experience as an elementary principal. One day, I was observing a math lesson, and there were a variety of short activities that just didn’t seem to fit together. It seemed like they were chosen at random, and I couldn’t make sense of why the teacher had put those activities together if she was trying to make a coherent lesson. But when I sat down with the teacher to talk about how it had gone, she beat me to it, and she said, “You know, I included all the activities that the teacher’s guide said to, but this spiral curriculum sometimes makes it feel like the lessons are just all over the place.”
And I realized that this wasn’t a case of a teacher planning lessons that didn’t make sense. It was a case of her doing her best to follow the curriculum as written, which we’d told teachers they needed to do. And it was indeed a spiral math curriculum, with concepts introduced and reviewed repeatedly in little chunks, with a bit more added on each time. It’s a great idea, but sometimes the lessons do feel a little scattered.
And I realized, wow, if I had jumped right into my feedback, and told her she needed to plan more coherent lessons, a) that wouldn’t have been very helpful, because she was following the teacher’s guide, like she was supposed to, and b) it would have damaged our relationship, because I’d have insulted her as a professional, instead of identifying a problem with the curriculum and figuring out a solution.
This was a situation where the teacher didn’t need me to tell her what to do, or criticize her lesson for being all over the place. She needed me to think with her about what adjustments we should make to the curriculum, so I needed to play a different role as an instructional leader.
If you think about the traditional approaches to classroom feedback, they’re almost always either directive or reflective, or what I call the boss and coach roles.
On the one hand, if we see something we want the teacher to do differently, we can be directive, and use our positional authority as the boss to simply tell the teacher to change.
On the other hand, if we want to help the teacher reflect on his or her practice, and think differently, we might use reflective questions. Even if your job title is administrator, you might find it helpful to play a coaching role to help teachers think differently.
And both of those are great options that we can choose from, depending on the situation. But in talking about that spiral math lesson, I needed to play a different role, one of exercising leadership in the system that the teacher was working within, because remember, the teacher had been told to teach the math curriculum like it said to in the teacher’s guide, but this was resulting in lessons that were full of unrelated activities. She didn’t need to change her behavior or change her thinking. Something else needed to change.
So I chose to play a different role, which I call the leader role, and this kind of feedback conversation is what I call reflexive feedback.
Reflexive feedback runs both directions, so as the leader I’m giving feedback to the teacher about her practice, but I’m also hearing her feedback about the conditions or system she’s working within. I was responsible for the system of expectations that said to teach this math curriculum in this particular way, so she couldn’t get better results for her students unless I did my part as a leader.
So to recap the three roles we can play in feedback conversations that change teacher practice, if we want to change teacher behavior, we can play the boss and give directive feedback, and just tell teachers what to do differently. Most of the time we want to avoid this role, but it can work when a teacher is new or struggling or not doing what they need to do.
If we want to help teachers think at a higher level and reflect on their practice, we can play the coach role and have reflective feedback conversations. This is probably the approach we’re taking most of the time with most teachers.
But there should always be an undercurrent of the third role, the leader who’s willing to change the system as needed to support the teacher’s success, and have truly reflexive, two-directional feedback conversations.
Now, because we’ve covered a lot of ground about the different roles instructional leaders play in this section, I also want to give you an in-depth article you can print out and read and think about as you continue to have feedback conversations with teachers. So below this video, look for the link to download my article How Instructional Leaders Change Teacher Practice. Print that out, and spend some time with it, and let me what you think.
In the next section, we’ll talk about how to make sure these conversations actually get results.
Read: How Instructional Leaders Change Teacher Practice »
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