Crafting the Feedback Teachers Need and Deserve: A Guide for Leaders

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by my guest, Thomas Van Zulen. Thomas is president of Van Zulen & Associates, As a former school district leader, he now provides professional development services to schools focusing on instructional strategies, critical friendship, leadership development, and teacher evaluation. And Thomas is here today to talk about his new book, Crafting the Feedback Teachers Need and Deserve, A Guide for Leaders.

[00:43] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:45] SPEAKER_01:

Thomas, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:47] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you, Justin. I appreciate the opportunity.

[00:49] SPEAKER_01:

So we've talked many times on Twitter through our Instructional Leadership Challenge Twitter chat about this idea of feedback on teaching. And I think in our profession, we recognize that we need to provide feedback. And the reality that I've discovered from leading more than 5,000 people through the Instructional Leadership Challenge is that as a foundation, getting started is absolutely critical because in our profession, teachers simply don't get enough feedback. But what you talk about in the book is actually the quality of the feedback. And I wonder if you could just set up for us what prompted you to write this book and to focus so specifically on the quality and the nature of the feedback that we provide to the teachers that we serve.

[01:32] SPEAKER_02:

In my last district post in a school district near Atlanta, We discovered that as we were getting ready to think about a new teacher evaluation system, that we had assumptions about our leaders. We assumed that leaders were able to write feedback that was helpful and useful to teachers. Unfortunately, that was untrue. So as a team, as an inquiry, a collaborative inquiry between school leaders and central office leaders, we said, all right, let's figure this out. Let's figure out what does really effective feedback look like for teachers. So we started scouring the literature and started looking around.

[02:15]

And unfortunately, we didn't find anything at all. It was a quiet, quiet boom in the literature. We contacted different supervisionists like Sally Zepeda, who is an incredible writer and author and scholar. And she lives right here in Georgia. And she said, nope, there's nothing yet. I'm working on something.

[02:35]

But nothing had been written. And so we started saying, okay, well, we have to figure this out. So why don't we start looking at what is great feedback for students? Because we had been working with teachers about what great feedback looks like for them. And of course, Wiggins and other kinds of authors have written extensively and beautifully and cogently about what makes great feedback for kids. So we used that as our starting place.

[02:59]

And then we just started engaging in lots of observations. We had monthly professional development with all of the leaders in the school that I was in. So we had principals, assistant principals, instructional coaches, deans of students, and we all came together and we spent quite a bit of time either watching videos of our own teachers teaching or sometimes even going into a school. And we would walk in and what we discovered is that we needed to make a shift in our purpose. often with teacher evaluation systems, we're so concerned about inter-rater reliability. But we discovered that we both could walk into a room, a friend and I could walk in there and we both say, oh yeah, that was proficient for assessment.

[03:41]

Absolutely. Oh good, next one. And we wouldn't be clear about actually what we saw. And so I think James Popham says it really well. We were concerned about inter-rater reliability, but what we really needed was inter-observer agreement. So when we started working on inter-observer agreement, when we'd walk out of a classroom, even if we were only in there five minutes, instead of saying, so what did you think about that?

[04:07]

We had to change it to say, what did we see and hear? And then we could start calibrating on what we actually saw and heard in the classroom. That probably was the most important moment for our leaders. And from that point on, then our inquiry really started to gain some steam. We added teachers to our team. And so we had teachers from every school that were part of this.

[04:29]

They learned how to write feedback. They gave us feedback on our feedback. And what we ended up with was a tool. A rubric didn't work for us. Instead, we used an innovation configuration map from the concerns-based work of the 80s. And this IC map became our assessment tool so that we could actually say, how good is the feedback that we're actually providing?

[04:53] SPEAKER_01:

So you started with actually calibrating not on different observers' overall assessment of what they saw, but their actual description, actual evidence that they recorded?

[05:04] SPEAKER_02:

Correct. So we would go in and we had to teach people how to describe data. There's a whole chapter in the book that talks about description, building your descriptive prowess. And what we quickly discovered is that we tend as leaders to interpret wildly. We're interpreting all the time. And frankly, that's a job hazard.

[05:27]

as a leader in a school and a school district. But when we're in a classroom, that wild interpretation often gets us more in trouble than is helpful to the classroom teacher. We were able to build a system where our goal was 80-20. 80% of what we provide to a classroom teacher is description. Only 20% of it would be interpretation or if we added any evaluation at all. We had some leaders that really shifted their practice and realized that as soon as you add an evaluative word like great or awesome or concerned, that changes things.

[06:08]

Teachers told us that as soon as we see that word as teachers, we're ignoring quite a bit around it. And so we needed to have the analogy we gave was if we want to give an interpretation or an evaluation, that's the roof of the house. Well, you better have some pretty strong walls to support that roof. And your walls are description. And so lots and lots of description. And we even said you might have a stucco roof versus a wood roof.

[06:40]

Well, it depends how heavy your roof is. That depends how much description you need.

[06:44] SPEAKER_01:

And I love the way that those walls, that evidence that you're providing, that description that you're providing to the teacher actually gives the teacher something that they often don't have after an observation. I've noticed when we go into a classroom and observe for a while, we take all of our notes, we've got our timestamps and our summary of what's happening moment by moment, but the teacher walks out of that classroom without that same record.

[07:07] SPEAKER_02:

Correct. And so one of the misconceptions that we had to disavow some people of, we had several administrators in that district that had been principals for a long time. They had learned about scripting a long time ago. Scripting is not new. But what they had been doing with their scripting is then leaving, taking all the scripts and just providing the interpretation to the teacher. The teacher actually never got the part they wanted.

[07:36] SPEAKER_01:

So we're doing it backwards.

[07:37] SPEAKER_02:

So it was really unfortunate. People were working so hard but then not giving the teachers what they really needed and wanted. So what happens to any skill that as an educator we realize, well, you know what? That's not so beneficial anymore. Well, then people drop it. And so there were scads of principals all over Georgia, I might say all over the nation, that knew how to script but they weren't doing it anymore because they didn't see any value in it.

[08:02]

So as we were going and working with teachers, teachers helped us realize we don't always need to hear from you what you think our next step is. Some of us are pretty good at this. And really, what would be great? Just tell us what you see and hear in the classroom and we can figure out the next steps. So we found a term that actually Sally Zepeda had used back in 1997. She used it to think about video recording classrooms before National Board for Teaching Standards was doing that kind of work.

[08:35]

And they called it auto supervision. But that was with a recording device. Well, we then started borrowing that term and said, wouldn't that be the ideal? Let's say that you could get 80 to 85% of your staff that actually auto supervise. As long as I provide them a rich description, they can take the next steps and they really don't need me as much anymore. Let's let them auto supervise, not automatic, auto meaning self.

[09:03] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and you've got that 80-20 split there so that the majority of your staff who would benefit from that can run with it, can have you kind of no longer the bottleneck or the barrier. But for maybe those 20% of staff who do need some more intensive support, maybe some more handholding, maybe some more directive feedback on what to focus on, you've got the time then to work in a more direct way with those staff. Is that right? Correct.

[09:29] SPEAKER_02:

Just like Carl Glickman told us years ago about developmental supervision, not everybody needs a directive approach. And if we provide this incredible descriptive feedback, one of the most exciting things in the principles that I got to work with is they realized they saved time. It sounds weird. Wait a minute. Aren't I working harder? You're working harder in the classroom.

[09:54]

But when you come out of the classroom, you shouldn't have to take that home and spend an hour trying to determine, oh, what should I write here? You know, I'm not really sure, how do I say that? So we actually built discipline with each other And we would have observations of entire mornings at each other's schools. We called them peer observations for principals. So it was inter-school observation. So I, at that point, was an associate superintendent.

[10:23]

Maybe I'm paired with an assistant principal at a school. I go to his school. He's already devised a calendar for me. And the two of us go. And here was our calendar. 15 minutes in, 20 minutes out.

[10:36]

which meant we can be up into a room 10 to 15 minutes. But at the end of that, when we go out in the hallway and talk, we have 20 minutes to write our feedback up. We had to build the discipline to not go on and on and on. And because the deal was the longer we talked, well, then the more interpretation and evaluation we were trying to put into the feedback. And that was huge. I've talked to so many assistant principals that spend a whole Saturday writing up five or six observations.

[11:06]

Well, that is not sustainable. Right.

[11:08] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and it gets back to the idea that Charlotte Danielson says in her book, Talk About Teaching. Whoever's doing the most work is doing the most learning. And we want, of course, principles to learn and to grow. But in the observation and feedback process, that's not our direct goal.

[11:23] SPEAKER_02:

Oh, absolutely. I wholeheartedly agree. However, many principals have told me that the best professional development they've ever had is working on their feedback because it's like this quiet, quiet place of leadership. It's like the dark corner of our office where the lamp doesn't hit. And nobody gives us feedback on our feedback.

[11:47] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and I think because we've so positioned that issue as one of inter-rater reliability and of trying to judge the lesson in a consistent way, you know, compared to how someone else would judge it maybe from a video. And I know in a lot of states, principals are required to complete observation calibration training where they practice scoring a video the same way as other administrators. And I have to say, personally, my perspective on that has always been that the lesson or, you know, much less five minutes of a lesson is not really the proper unit of evaluation for professional practice. I mean, I really want to know. I could care less if those were the best five minutes of instruction or not. I really care long term.

[12:29]

You know, how is this teacher thinking? How are they making decisions? How are they planning? How are they interacting? Using assessment and and I might not see that in those five minutes and that's not the most important thing but over time I am going to see patterns and the more richly I can describe those patterns the better a sense I'm going to have of that teachers overall practice at the end of the year compared to you know Did you did you make magic happen in the the ten minutes that I was in the classroom or not? And here's you know, here are some points for that if you did Oh Justin, I totally agree

[12:59] SPEAKER_02:

And the colleagues that are in that district where I used to work, Georgia rolled out a new teacher evaluation system after I left. And I had conversations with them about how did the state training go? The principals admitted that they were not the best participants because they were used to a quality about teaching and talking about what we saw and what did that mean. And they kept asking more and more questions because they had been so deep into that learning. That was the fifth year that these leaders had been focused on evaluation. How many times can we say in our profession we've been working on something for five years as leaders?

[13:43]

It was deep. They knew a lot and unfortunately the state trainers weren't always amenable to their questions because they didn't have frankly the depth of understanding that these leaders did.

[13:55] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. Well, what are some of the nuances when people get really good at feedback, when administrators gain a ton of experience in that scripting and in writing that feedback for teachers, what are some of the nuances that show up that distinguish their high-quality feedback from maybe more typical feedback? We've talked a little bit about the descriptive and the narrative aspect, but what are some of the details that really come out when we get good at this?

[14:25] SPEAKER_02:

One thing that pops up right away, I just left a school this morning. I had a consult at a school with a principal I've known for years. She said, I've been talking with you all weekend. I said, Christine, I don't think we did. She pulled the book out. She had just read the book over the weekend.

[14:45]

She said, it feels like I've been having a conversation with you all weekend. She is mentioned in the preface and she was a big part of the book. She said, Even with having this journey with you, the biggest thing that she had pulled out that she realized she has grown a lot in her description, but the one thing that she really grabbed this read through was about assumptions. So like you said a moment ago, just because we've been in a classroom or seen a video for five minutes, it certainly doesn't mean that we know what's going on in that room. And so a nuance for people that are good at writing feedback, leaders that have worked on it hard, is that they know how to explicitly own and raise assumptions in written feedback. And we haven't mentioned that yet on this call, that this book is designed to how to write written feedback.

[15:39]

It's a very refined niche. So it's not about how do you have crucial conversations, hard conversations, fierce conversations, difficult conversations, pick one. There are all kinds of people that can talk about that. This is about how to write written feedback that really helps people think and doesn't tick them off. Instead, it provides a platform for them to really think about their practice. And when teachers told us, hey, you don't always know everything in the room, all the leaders said, oh, no, no, we don't pretend to know.

[16:13]

But the teachers say, your written feedback sounds like you think you do. So chapter six in the book talks all about how do you own and surface assumptions? How do you do that in written feedback in a way that really helps a teacher accept the fact that this observer is savvy enough to know that she doesn't know everything that's going on in my room. I'm gonna accept that from her, and now I'm gonna look at what she says.

[16:42] SPEAKER_01:

And so often when we're in that situation, we're afraid to admit that, so we work really hard to come up with as many suggestions as we can. Did you think about doing this? Did you set this up this way? As a next step, will you do that? And those are questions that are so easily answered by the teacher that we're just afraid to ask them or we're afraid to allow the teacher to sit in the driver's seat because we feel like we own that. Providing the next steps, providing the suggestions is our job when, as you said, often we don't have the information because we weren't there.

[17:11]

Oh, yeah.

[17:12] SPEAKER_02:

And the second thing I think leads right into that, Justin, the two features of people that write feedback really well for teachers. And notice I'm saying for teachers, not to teachers.

[17:22] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

[17:22] SPEAKER_02:

The language I keep using in the book is, you're writing this for a reader. You're writing your feedback for a reader. Now, the reader is the teacher, but you have an audience here. Well, every author considers their audience. So think of this as you're writing for an audience, not to, but for them. And so the second thing that is really difficult for certain people, and particularly I find this leaders that used to be instructional coaches, they have a big difficulty with this.

[17:53]

And it's asking questions in written feedback. And here's why the teachers we worked with said it's a problem for us. Because when we ask a question in written feedback, what are we basically positioning that teacher to do? Answer it. Yeah. So they kind of go through this little flow map.

[18:15]

in their head. Imagine like there's a yes, no flow map. Am I supposed to write back? Yes or no? Okay, yes. Do I need to write back or should I make an appointment?

[18:24]

Oh, if I write back, should I write back in the portal where I found this information or should I do an email? Do I have to do like an official thing for some file? Is there really a file? Who has that file? And so what's happening is teachers are expending all this cognitive energy thinking about whether to respond or not to the question. And really what we're hoping that they think about is actually not the suggestion itself, but the gap that the suggestion is designed to plug.

[18:55]

And that is a huge shift for people. How can I not write questions? And so the skill that we build in the book is called using conditional language to so that the teacher can ponder a possible gap in their practice. Not the suggestion, but the gap.

[19:13] SPEAKER_01:

Let's get into what that looks like, because I think that kind of nerve wracking process of reading written feedback and encountering a question and thinking, do I need to write back, you know, can prompt a reaction of defensiveness where the teacher says, oh, yes, I absolutely do that. And here's everything I went through. And yes, I absolutely do that. Or it can prompt a reaction of compliance where people say, oh, boy, this is this is what my principal is looking for. I've got to go all in on doing that. And in a lot of cases, the principal just kind of made up the question, wasn't really thinking about it very hard, just needed something to say.

[19:44]

And we send teachers into this spiral of activity, as you said, and really hard cognitive work that's time consuming. And we've got to be sure that that's actually productive for them and that they're responding to that in kind of ways that are consistent with what we intend. So yeah, talk to us more about that gap. What does that gap mean?

[20:02] SPEAKER_02:

I actually would argue that is the hardest thing to work on when you're used to writing question after question after question. And so one thing when I work with leaders, often their evaluation experience is not a rich one. Like being the evaluatee, if that's even a word, their feedback stories and evaluation stories are often not very rich. We liken it to almost like a Jewish Passover. Let's say you were a top-notch teacher. Well, the administrator then has to decide, okay, I've got time for one observation today.

[20:40]

Should I go in this room? You know what? No, I'm going to Passover him. He's good. He's fine. She's got it all together.

[20:47]

I don't have to worry about her. And so what happens is just like we have a group of teachers that maybe have never been differentiated for, but now we're requiring them to differentiate. I think we have the same thing for leaders. We're asking them to write high-quality feedback. They've actually never received it. And so if they've received feedback, it's been full of glows, no grows, glow, and then not even an occasional question.

[21:16]

So those leaders don't know what it feels like to get a bevy or an arsenal of questions in written feedback. They don't know what that's like. And so we have to position them to see it from another perspective, which, of course, in all of our work, that's one of the most difficult things we do as humans is to try to see somebody else's perspective. So something that I found with conditional language is the use of sentence stems and prompts is huge. A language teacher told me this recently. I do professional development about learning communities, and we've been using a lot of sentence stems.

[21:55]

And this language acquisition teacher from Texas who teaches all new-to-the-country kids, she said, you know what? I feel like one of my kids. And I said, oh, in what way is that like? She said, I am learning the language of collaboration, and I didn't know I needed it.

[22:13] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

[22:14] SPEAKER_02:

I need these sentence stems to know what to say when, and it's limiting, but I know I need it. Well, I think the same thing for leaders. If we say don't write questions, but then we don't give them any help about how not to write questions, that almost feels like malpractice. So some of the stems that are really helpful for people as they're thinking about conditional language, it seems that...

[22:42]

Or it's possible that X might be going on.

[22:49]

It appears that perhaps these are, there are conditional words that I think as leaders sometimes we're taught not to use, like we're supposed to be definitive and supposed to be clear. Well, maybe if we're in a directive situation with a struggling teacher, yes, then definitely let's not use conditional language. But if we're trying to encourage a teacher to ponder a possible gap in their practice, well, then we need some conditional words that can help us frame this language.

[23:20] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and that makes sense not only because we don't know everything, we don't have the definitive perspective on what happened before we were in the room or what's going to happen after, but I think also because of the mindset that it cultivates in teachers that it's not just, I have to do what my principal just told me when he popped in, but There are multiple ways to teach well. There are multiple things that would work. And it's my job as the teacher to be in the habit of making good decisions from all those possibilities.

[23:48] SPEAKER_02:

And so for me, I think of it as a data set. So when folks say, well, what are you doing in the classroom? Are you evaluating? And I said, actually, I'm observing and I'm collecting data. Oh, you're collecting data because the teacher's in trouble? No, this isn't.

[24:05]

Meaning it's a tier two for an adult. I'm collecting data because we all can use data on our practice. Think of all the questions teachers ask in a day, all the decisions teachers make in a day. Wouldn't it be helpful if just for 10 minutes or so, somebody tried to write down everything that they see or hear? How enlightening that might be. And what I've particularly discovered is that from the high flyers on our staff, the ones that we pass over, we don't give them feedback on their teaching because we don't necessarily think they need any.

[24:42]

Oh, they're ready to be a teacher leader. They don't need me. I actually think they need you just like everybody else. And it's an inequitable experience when we don't give them highly usable feedback. Well, some leaders believe highly usable must equal suggestions. I disagree.

[25:03]

I think highly usable means description. And the rock star teachers that I've offered description for, the teachers of the year at comprehensive huge high schools, a teacher of the year for an entire school district of 99,000 kids, she said, I have never received feedback like this. That actually is going to help me. and what I thought was amazing, I didn't put a single idea in there. She didn't need an idea from me. She just needed data about what somebody else saw in her room.

[25:33] SPEAKER_01:

And that's it right there. I think we're so afraid to get into the classrooms of our best teachers because we're worried that we're not going to have any suggestions for improvement. Honestly, we're often right about that. When you get into a really fantastic teacher's classroom, you're not going to find something to nitpick. You might find some little thing that you can share as an idea. But honestly, I want my best teachers to be a better teacher than I am.

[25:57]

I don't want to be the ceiling on the level of practice in my building. And I think that that fear that I'm going to go in and I'm going to see a great lesson and I'm not going to have any suggestions for improvement. It makes us avoid those top performing teachers and, you know, in addition to the kind of prioritization and time saving function that we use to justify that. But I think we impoverish ourselves as learners. We miss so many opportunities to learn and to grow and to just be exposed to the highest quality teaching. And that would transfer so well to our leadership in other classrooms where maybe people do need more suggestions.

[26:35]

They do need more guidance because we're not spending that time in the classrooms of our best teachers.

[26:41] SPEAKER_02:

And again, one of the reasons why I think we're not spending time in those rooms is A, we don't think they need it. B, we're afraid that we don't have suggestions. But C, there's the time element like we referenced before. I don't have time to write up an observation for her. I'm going to spend my time doing something else. Well, how about don't spend an hour outside of that observation?

[27:04]

Spend 100% of your energy when you're in the observation writing description. 100%, no interpretation, no evaluation while you're in the room. Just record everything you see in here, 10 minutes. Sometimes I'm breathless when I leave a classroom because I've been working really, really hard. Then when I get out in the hall, Now, if you want to put some interpretation and evaluation in there, go for it. Maybe you hovered over the keys at a certain moment in the lesson.

[27:35]

Hey, that might be an indication for you. That moment, maybe that's the spot for an interpretation. It doesn't mean it's a spot for a suggestion. It might be a spot for something to help this teacher ponder something. But frankly, 20 minutes, 10 minutes in a top-notch teacher's classroom, 10 minutes writing it up and sending it to her, oh my goodness, the dividends on that are huge.

[27:57] SPEAKER_01:

So I think we share a lot of common ground in our philosophy about this, Thomas, that we can do dramatically better as instructional leaders by getting into classrooms, providing that descriptive feedback, and to the greatest extent possible, resisting the temptation to always have to leave a suggestion, but really just providing that. that evidence that can serve as the basis for the teacher's reflection and asking good questions. But what you're describing is kind of a tall order. It's a big change for most people compared to kind of typical practice. What do you recommend as some starting points for people who say, all right, I want to do this. I want to provide better feedback.

[28:33]

I want to stop doing the little suggestions and feedback sandwiches and hit and runs. I really want to do something that's professionally valuable for me and professionally valuable for my teachers, where do they start?

[28:45] SPEAKER_02:

Great question to think about. I think we often hear something new and then when we do not commit to a first action, it becomes yet another binder on the shelf or another book next to the nightstand. So at the end of each chapter in the book, I actually have a little section called Try It Yourself. And there are three, four or five ways to think about that. I've been heavily involved in the school reform initiative for several years. And that organization builds culture in schools.

[29:17]

It really focuses on how to create equitable learning environments for students and for adults. And I could argue that writing high quality feedback is an equity issue. And so many of the SRI protocols and processes are built into this book. There are ways that you can work using those kinds of skill sets. So one idea that's just at the end of chapter three says, practice your descriptive skills the next time you're on lunch duty with kids. Sit and write or type.

[29:46]

Don't let the pen leave the paper or let your fingers hover. Keep on writing just for 60 seconds. See if you can even do that. That might be the first step for people. There's a situation in the book with a principal I worked with. He and I were in a classroom for 10 minutes together.

[30:01]

We weren't sitting together because that can certainly be disconcerting to a teacher when adults are talking in the classroom. And we walked out of the room and I went, whew, that was a lot. And he said, what do you mean? And he showed me his legal pad and he had two sentences. I had two pages. So just that notion of, hey, we're not there to write a summary.

[30:25]

I think we've been summarizing for so many years with practicing principals and leaders. This is not about that. We have to really work hard while we're in there. So maybe the first step for many people is just to start working hard, really trying to describe And if you're in a building and you're fortunate enough to have another leader in the building with you, if you both go in together, even five minutes, and both just describe what you see and hear, and then when you come out, practice inter-observer agreement, not inter-rater reliability. And the best way to do that is not to ask each other this question. So what did you think?

[31:03]

Nope. Have the discipline to not ask that question. Instead, ask, what did you see in here? Let's see if I saw and heard the same thing.

[31:12] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Thomas, if people want to find you online and learn more about your work, where can they locate you on the internet?

[31:18] SPEAKER_02:

VanZulanAssociates.com. Unfortunately, a big, long Dutch name, V-A-N-S-O-E-L-E-N, associates.com. And we do this work in several spots in the southeast United States. And it's incredibly rewarding work.

[31:34]

So I highly encourage people to really reconsider how they're giving feedback to their staff. It's a culture issue. It's an equity issue. And it's also an instructional quality issue.

[31:44] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Crafting the Feedback Teachers Need and Deserve a Guide for Leaders. Thomas, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[31:52] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you, Justin.

[31:52] SPEAKER_00:

I was really excited to talk with you about it. And now, Justin Bader on High Performance Instructional Leadership.

[32:00] SPEAKER_01:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Thomas van Zulen? One of my big conclusions was the idea that feedback can just be description. We can just describe what we saw hand that over to the teacher for their consideration, have a conversation about it, and that can be incredibly powerful. And we've got to get away from the idea that in order for an instructional leadership interaction to be valuable, we have to be the ones coming up with the next steps, with the suggestions for improvement, with the fixes that need to be made. I firmly believe that we'll have better results if teachers do that work. If we provide the evidence, if we provide the accountability for aligning with our instructional framework, if we're situating that evidence within the language of our instructional framework, we don't have to evaluate it.

[32:55]

We don't have to say, this lesson was a four or the five minutes that I was in your classroom looked like a three to me. We don't have to do that. We don't have to provide those next steps. All we have to do is provide the evidence and have the conversation and keep the teacher in the driver's seat. So I hope you'll check out Thomas's book. And if I can help you with actually recording that feedback with being in the classroom, taking notes, scripting what's happening, I want you to check out the repertoire app at principalcenter.com slash repertoire because it was purposely built specifically for this

[33:26]

reason to make this easier on you as you're sitting there writing, as you're typing, you've got your timestamps, anything you've typed before repertoire will suggest to you. So all you have to do is hit enter and it can speed up your typing speed by about 90%, hit a button and it automatically gets sent to the teacher and any other email addresses that you specify. So check out repertoire at principalcenter.com slash repertoire. You can try that for 30 days for a dollar and I will even help you set it up personally and it will result in better feedback.

[33:55] Announcer:

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