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Welcome to Module 3 of the Instructional Leadership Challenge. Now it’s time to talk about talking with teachers! It’s not enough to just observe and provide written feedback; in fact, up to this point, I’ve encouraged you not to provide feedback at all, at least not in your first couple of visits. That’s because there’s a simpler, more powerful approach: conversation.
For some reason, a lot of approaches to instructional leadership overlook the power of this basic human way of communicating. I’m amazed at how many people think they need to fill out a form to give feedback, because, honestly, don’t we all hate it when people fill out forms about us? The last time someone filled out a form about me, it was probably a speeding ticket! Not a good experience. It’s much more helpful to just have a conversation.
But it’s not just that teachers prefer conversations. Conversation is far more powerful for professional growth, because it allows us to listen and learn, and not just tell the teacher what to do. As Stephen Covey used to say, as one of his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, we need to seek first to understand, then to be understood. This is especially true if we’re helping people get better at something as complicated as teaching.
Often, when we give feedback to teachers, we’re only seeing a tiny bit of their practice, based on what we observe in the moment, but there’s much more that we can’t see. Teaching is like an iceberg – there’s part that’s visible, above the surface, but there’s also much more that’s not visible, because it happens behind the scenes, outside of class, like planning and preparation, or it’s part of the teacher’s invisible thinking and decision-making. If you’re not sure what I mean, just take a look at teacher evaluation rubrics like the Danielson Framework. Domain 1 is Planning and Preparation, and domain 4 is Professional Responsibilities, both of which aren’t directly observable during class. Now, I don’t know what your district uses, but I’m guessing your evaluation criteria address things you can’t see directly.
So how do we make the invisible, visible? How do we get a sense of those non-observable aspects of teaching practice? Well, the answer is simple: by talking. When we talk with teachers about what we do see, they can fill us in on their thinking and all the other aspects of practice that we can’t see.
So the kinds of conversations that we’re talking about in the Instructional Leadership Challenge are what I call evidence-based, framework-linked conversations, because what we’re discussing is firsthand evidence of classroom practice. But it’s not just raw data, and we’re not just sharing our opinions about it. We’re talking about practice using the specific language of our instructional framework, which we’ll get into in Module 4. These conversations reveal to us the whole iceberg of teacher practice, so we can understand where each teacher is, and how to help them improve.
Now, before we go into more depth on how to have these conversations with teachers, we need to talk about the elephant in the room, or rather, the sandwich in the room. I’m talking about the feedback sandwich. You might not call it that, but I’m sure you’ve experienced it. The feedback sandwich has probably been used on you, and you may have even been taught to use this approach with teachers.
Here’s how the feedback sandwich works: there’s some meaty feedback in the middle, but to make it more palatable to the teacher, before and after you tell them what they should change, you give them a compliment.
So the whole sandwich goes compliment, suggestion, compliment, just as a sandwich goes bread, meat, bread. Butter them up, then give them the constructive criticism, then smooth things out with another compliment. Does that sound familiar? Probably so. But does it work?
First of all, let’s be clear: teachers are onto us! They can tell when we’re using the old feedback sandwich, so they probably don’t really appreciate those compliments, because they know we’re just trying to cushion the blow of our feedback, which, if it works too well, undermines the feedback we want teachers to hear about what they could do differently.
So the compliments are either insincere, or if teachers focus too much on them, because they’re really good compliments, they might miss the point of the feedback in the middle. Either way, it doesn’t work.
If you’re not sure about the feedback sandwich, try it in your personal life. Test it out on a significant other in the next few days, and every time you have a request or feedback for someone at home, wrap it in compliments, and see how it feels, like “You look really nice today. Could you take out the trash? You have such a nice personality!” I guarantee you’re going to get a weird look, and that weird look should be all the proof you need that the feedback sandwich doesn’t work at work, either. It’s just that when you’re the boss, often people don’t tell you when you’re doing something that makes them feel weird. They think it’s their job to just go along with it.
So let’s give up the feedback sandwich, and in the next section, I’ll share with you an alternative that’s actually much easier and much less awkward.
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