Good Feedback Based on 5-10 Minutes of Observation? Only If It's a Conversation

Can classroom walkthroughs result in good feedback?

If you have been on the receiving end of many classroom walkthroughs, you might have found that some of the feedback is a little bit unhelpful or a little bit off base.

And if you've been doing classroom walkthroughs, you may have found it very difficult to come up with something meaningful to say.

especially on the basis of a pretty short visit.

You know, it gets easier if you see a whole lesson, but if you're only coming into the classroom for five, 10, 15 minutes, you may struggle to come up with something that's really on target and meaningful.

And one of the things that I discovered pretty early on was that a lot of my questions or suggestions would be obviated and taken care of by being familiar with the curriculum, right?

Like if I would ask somebody, why did you do this?

The If I would have a suggestion, the curriculum would speak to whether that was a useful suggestion or not.

So if we're going to get into classrooms frequently and do classroom walkthroughs like I talk about in, now we're talking 21 days to high performance instructional leadership, we've got to figure out how to make sure that our feedback is helpful, knowing that there are certain limits on just how good a job we can do coming up with feedback based on a little tiny observation.

And what I eventually came to was the realization that we don't need to come up with prepackaged feedback, right?

There's this idea that as the administrator, as the observer, maybe you're an instructional coach, you should be able to observe for a few minutes and then come up with a compliment and then a suggestion for improvement and then another compliment and deliver that kind of feedback sandwich, you know, kind of like an Arby's roast beef sandwich.

The meat is in the middle of the, you know, the suggestion for improvement.

That idea of the feedback sandwich seems to be everybody's kind of default assumption And yet it doesn't really come from anywhere.

There's nobody who has ever researched this and said, you know, it's an effective way to give feedback, to just come up with a suggestion and then sandwich it between two compliments.

And to do all of that based on five or 10 minutes of kind of out of context observation.

What I discovered firsthand and through thinking about this and through reading everything that had been written about classroom walkthroughs and then again, writing my own book, now we're talking about classroom walkthroughs, was that the feedback comes through a conversation and the realization about what each teacher needs to do comes not through mining a very tiny observation more deeply for stuff that may not be there, but for showing up more often, right?

The idea of a classroom walkthrough that you do just once and only stay for a few minutes and never come back again, like being productive, it just doesn't hold up.

But if you get around to every classroom frequently if you get on maybe a two-week rotation you're going to see every classroom you know 15 18 times a year and you're really going to have a sense of what people need to improve and often what they need is not advice or tips or suggestions or criticisms or compliments what they need is maybe a whole different curriculum maybe a whole different type of professional development and you will only discover that by talking with people about their practice so that's what you'll find in this book you can find that at principalcenter.com hit me up with any questions