As ‘instructional coaching’ gains prominence, forms of directive coaching and lesson feedback are in the limelight. To a few, directing an action step to teacher is essential; to others, lesson feedback should arrive at these sorts of actions through dialogue. While perhaps a cliché, a middle way is probably possible. My preference is to co-construct a next step with the person I give feedback to. But sometimes the situation (or their preference) means I’m more directive.
Perhaps common sense says that we should offer more direction to inexperienced or struggling colleagues and give more choice to experienced, effective colleagues. There’s certainly something in this but there’s probably more to unpack.
In reality, an effective feedback conversation is directing the teacher as it prompts thought that they otherwise wouldn’t have had and sheds light on what they didn’t see. If a feedback conversation doesn’t do this, then what was the point? But prompting thought isn’t only about giving an action step at the end of the conversation.
Without focusing on action steps, here are four ways feedback givers direct the feedback receiver.
- Give the facts
Experienced teachers sometimes want more directive coaching. Tell me what I’m doing wrong, can be the refrain. Perhaps experience wins us an awareness of the gaps in our awareness. I’m not sure these teachers always want to be told what they’re doing ‘wrong’ or ‘what to do’ but they probably want to be told what they’re missing.
As the person giving the feedback, we’re on a mission to notice what isn’t noticed by the teacher. Good ways to notice include:
- Counting the number of students following instructions. Is everyone working from the textbook? Are students showing their working or writing in full sentences? How does student action compare with teacher instruction or modelling?
- Record teacher phrases. We can literally record a teacher (with their permission) but we can also write down what they say. Are they aware of their phrasing? If they said one thing and students did another, were they conscious of the disconnect?
- Ask students. Ask students what the teacher just said. Ask students to re-explain a concept or process they’ve just heard about. Ask students to explain the work they’ve completed and how happy they are with it. Compare these things to the instructions, the explanations and the models of the teacher.
We can use the data collected above to phrase comments and questions on the lesson like this:
- I noticed that 5 students didn’t write in full sentences when you asked them to. How much of a problem is that for you?
- I asked three students to re-explain acceleration to me and only one of them could. The first two students were confused about…
Of course, facts can be used to highlight potential areas to work on as well as positives – 100% of students started as soon as you said ‘Go’… I asked five students to repeat back your instructions and they could all do it…
Giving the facts is a way of pushing in the direction of direction. It’s a remedy for that Guess what’s in my head category of feedback that asks How did you think the class discussion went? when we both know it went terribly. It gives some feedback – through the facts – but invites response – through associated questions.
- Challenge assumptions
With the data we’ve collected, we can start to push back on assumptions made by the teacher. We all have blind spots, not because we’re terrible people but because we’re human.
Use the facts you’ve collected to challenge assumptions. This can work in a:
You said X. I saw Y formula
You’ve said behaviour is a problem but I was in the lesson for twenty minutes and saw no disruption at all.
You’ve said pace is the problem but the five students I spoke to said they didn’t understand the explanation before the independent practice started.
We can then invite response:
Does that feel typical?
- Define a problem
I tend to concern myself more with defining a problem in lessons I visit than having a definite action step ready.
Problems might be as simple as:
Students weren’t listening to the instructions
There wasn’t a check for understanding before the task and students struggled
They could be more complicated:
The check for understanding didn’t check all students. Several students misunderstood when spoken to afterwards.
Problems might be phrased as hypotheses:
Lack of rehearsal of individual concepts/terms may lead to shallow knowledge and misconceptions embedded in independent tasks.
Depending on the person we’re working with, we might share one or multiple problems.
This can work as follows (for a teacher we think can handle it):
I think we’ve got a couple of problem areas we could focus on. Which do you think sounds more important/pressing for you?
Or it could work like this for a teacher who needs more direction:
There’s one area I want to zoom in on as we discuss further.
If we’re not sure what the teacher needs, we could also ask them what they want before getting to this stage:
I’ve prepared a couple of areas we could talk about. Would you like to talk through each of them or just focus on the one I think is the priority?
If we disagree on the problem, the feedback giver needs to challenge assumptions using the facts/data they’ve collected.
- Engineer action
Much is made of practice at the moment. I’m persuaded that practice can be a powerful tool for teachers to embed behaviours. But I’m not convinced that practice works in every circumstance or for every next step.
At times, we might force ourselves to practice something because practice is good. At others, we might distort our next step to fit with the practice. We also probably overestimate what a fifteen minute practice session (potentially once a fortnight or less) can do in the face of a week with twenty-plus hours of teaching.
Practice might work well when we need to phrase our questions more effectively. It might work well when we need to manage behaviour more decisively and want to bank some key scripts from the policy. It will probably have an impact when we think about managing transitions – like the students coming into the room or children moving from tables to carpet. I use practice with teachers in these circumstances and others and model what I’d expect to see.
But consider these scenarios:
A teacher uses mini-whiteboards but doesn’t check them thoroughly and progresses before students properly understand.
We could get that teacher to stand at a point in the room where they can see the whiteboards they need to see. We could get them to crane their neck and scan the room. Or we could embed in their planning a reminder to check specific whiteboards. A calendar reminder or a post-it note on the desk probably does the same job as the practice session.
A teacher assumes students understand the meaning of acceleration but their work shows misunderstanding between acceleration and speed.
The moment has passed, maybe for a year, for that teacher to explain acceleration for the first time. They can plan and practice a re-explanation of the distinction but they can’t re-do the first time right away.
The teacher might be better served by planning a task that adequately makes the distinction between two terms.
A teacher and their coach are looking at books after a lesson. It’s clear during the independent practice that some students needed help and didn’t ask for it. The teacher wasn’t aware in the lesson.
The teacher and coach use the seating plan to map a route to circulate the classroom that will visit the key students. This might mean a change in seating plan.
In each of the scenarios above practice could be useful. My argument isn’t that it’s useless here but that there are other things we can do (and perhaps at times should do) to engineer action on the part of the teacher.
When you think about coaching or feeding back to teachers, what are the active ingredients of what sort of conversation? It is the coach’s job to provide direction but that direction doesn’t necessarily have to come solely (or at all) in the form of a specific next step. It’s not that I would never give a teacher a single, actionable next step that I have decided on. It’s that the work that goes into giving feedback, direction and guidance extends beyond the next step.
Our planning of a conversation should guide the teacher through the lesson, its potential problems and possible solutions. In that way, even quite dialogic feedback is directing the receiver, even if that direction is just to attend again to the details of the lesson.
Peter Foster 
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