Teacher chat on social media is at its best when there is healthy discussion around how best we can do our job, grounded in mutual respect. That doesn’t mean an echo-chamber in which we all congratulate each other on what a marvellous job we’re doing, rather that there is a discourse which pushes our thinking, makes us reflect on what we’re doing and how we might make it even better. There have been a couple of great blogs this year in which teachers have responded to the ideas and challenges presented by others. For example, Ben Newmark talks here about how Adam Boxer’s blog ‘annoyed him’ (it didn’t really) because it required a response – in that instance to address a specific challenge in the classroom.
And so I find myself annoyed (not really, of course) by this post from Tom Sherrington on the feedback teachers receive following some form of lesson observation. You should really read the whole thing yourself but to summarise the key points I took from it: Feedback should take place as a dialogue between the observer and the teacher Feedback is best when it is co-constructed between both parties, rather than simply transmitted by the observer (Tom has further clarified exactly what he means by co-construction in a subsequent post here) How feedback is received will depend on the knowledge, experience, individual characteristics and context-specific factors (eg how tired or busy they might be at that moment) – and this needs to be remembered by the person giving the feedback Feedback sent via email doesn’t really afford any of the above, and so is unlikely to be helpful. It probably won’t lead to a teacher actually changing their practice. In fact, Tom describes this as outright rude.
On many of the points above I agree. I think there are significant practical challenges to overcome in order that feedback can be co-constructed in a dialogical way – finding the time to have face-to-face conversations is just difficult in busy schools. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t endeavour to build structures and systems that can accommodate it; arguably it’s one of the most powerful things we can actually spend our limited time doing – but making that a reality is still incredibly difficult. So why am I annoyed? Because it means what currently happens in my school might not be good enough. I am, in Ben Newmark’s words, forced to respond to this because I want to do better. To set the scene, in our school we have two parallel ‘coaching’ programmes running. One involves a small cohort of teachers engaging in instructional coaching. In our case that means a fortnightly cycle of lesson drop-in and coaching meeting with a focus on granular action steps. Given the time and resources we would love to expand this to include a much broader range of teachers, possibly even all staff. But we’ve got to work within the realms of possibility and so at the moment the majority of our staff get something different. Every teacher gets a lesson drop-in (we avoid the term observation to help make a break with a previously formalised protocol) once per term from a learning coach (again, we’ve tried to avoid a system whereby feedback is given by senior leaders or even Heads of Department to try to get away from the sense of this being a ‘top-down’ approach). I’ve described this in more detail, and how it fits within our wider appraisal system, here. And so to the crux of Tom’s argument, that feedback sent via email isn’t worth it. As mentioned above, I can’t argue with the fact that email feedback is one-way and offers little chance for a dialogic process, and certainly little room for co-construction. It is, also, very hard to be alive to all of the personal and contextual factors that might influence how our feedback is received. If someone’s having a bad day and then get an email at the end of it offering feedback on a part of lesson, maybe that’s not going to be the most helpful thing. So should we just ditch email feedback? I’m not sure. I think part of this comes down to playing the percentages game and considering a cost-benefit analysis – do I think this system is causing more harm than good? Some teachers are responding to email feedback (positively). We get replies to our emails, or people stop us in the corridor to talk about it. We see changes in practice in subsequent drop-ins, and in targets set as part of the appraisal process. It generates discussion in the staffroom, over lunch, or during our regular CPD sessions. Is it working for everyone? No. Is the trend one of general improvement? Yes (or at least as far as we can tell). Some people don’t respond and maybe some of them do think email feedback is rude. Do I think they represent the majority of colleagues? No. Do I think that some of them are the kinds of people that will perceive any feedback as rude/pointless and reject it regardless of how well co-constructed and how dialogic the process is… perhaps. As Tom pointed out, rudeness is in the eye of the receiver and there may be little we can do about that, other than simply not sending it of course. But how feedback is framed can probably help to mitigate this, and at the very least cause no offence. One key principle is that we always give some form of positive feedback. We’ve worked really hard to ensure that this is genuine, concrete and specific (see here for further discussion and examples). We hope that we are again breaking that association people have between feedback and previous styles of lesson observation in which the positives were simply something to fill the time before we got told what to do better and what grade we’d got. What about critique? Again, language choices are important here. We aim to replicate some of the key elements of a coaching conversation here by providing evidence and then asking questions. We might make suggestions, but this is framed as an invitation to consider a possibility, not a directive. It’s not “You did X, you should have done Y” rather it’s “I noticed X happened when you did Y. What might have happened if you’d tried Z instead?” Sometimes we do nothing more than ask teachers to reflect on what happened “I noticed X and wondered what the rationale for this was?” or “I saw that some pupils were doing X, what impact might this have had on their learning? How might you deal with this differently?” Sometimes we don’t pose any questions or offer any suggestions at all, we simply acknowledge that we saw a great bit of teaching, and have nothing to suggest that might improve anything. It’s possible that a different coach, particularly one with subject-specific expertise, might have found something to work on, but we don’t want to go hunting for things just for the sake of it. To use Tom’s phrase, we’re trying to avoid making this look like one big ego trip. So, to conclude, I’m (obviously) not really annoyed with Tom. In fact quite the opposite – his post has challenged me to think and do better. I know that the model we’ve got isn’t yet ideal, and this reflection has made me think harder about where and how to improve. Ultimately I agree it would be better if we didn’t have email feedback but how we move to a better system, and precisely what that will look like is a challenge we’re still grappling with. But it’s also helped me think about the hard work we’ve put in to make it as good as it can be in its current state. We’re not where we want to be yet but we also don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of good. What we’re doing is, slowly, working. Not everywhere, and not as quickly as we might like, but things are getting better. There are noticeable shifts in our school culture that mean, when the time is right and we can overcome the barriers to making the system work even better, we will be in a better place to do so. So thank you, Tom. This was useful feedback that I’m responding to. And, ironically, it was a blogpost that did this, something even less direct, personalised and co-constructed than an email!
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