What If Feedback Was Just a Conversation?

What if feedback was just a conversation?

For some reason, we have this idea that after a walkthrough or an observation, the feedback has to include both positives and negatives, warm and cool feedback, compliments and criticisms or suggestions.

Often the feedback sandwich is the format where there's a kind of butter you up compliment and then a suggestion for improvement or some sort of criticism and then another compliment to end on a positive note.

For some reason, almost everybody does this.

But in writing my first book, I discovered this doesn't really come from anywhere.

It's not a research-based practice.

There are no authors who specifically recommend it.

And if you think about it, it doesn't really work all that well because if you know you're supposed to give a compliment or you're supposed to get a compliment, that compliment becomes a lot less meaningful.

And if you know that there has to be a suggestion for improvement, that suggestion for improvement becomes a lot less meaningful.

And I guess what that leaves me with is the sense that any kind of artificial format is going to be inauthentic.

So it has made sense to me for a long time that feedback should primarily be a conversation, right?

That when we talk with each other about instructional practice, it should be an authentic conversation that doesn't have some sort of fixed number of compliments and suggestions for improvement.

Like sometimes there don't need to be any suggestions for improvement.

Sometimes there don't need to be any compliments.

Sometimes we don't need to talk about the person or the lesson.

Sometimes we need to talk about how student learning works or how the curriculum works or other factors related to the success of the lesson other than what the teacher did.

And it makes a certain amount of sense to talk about what the teacher did, but I don't think we always have to do that in a thumbs up or thumbs down kind of way, right?

We're not Siskel and Ebert.

We don't have to immediately give a yes or no, a warm or a cool, a positive and negative, that kind of thing.

Like that is not necessary for really understanding practice and for identifying and taking advantage of opportunities to improve practice.

And one of the biggest opportunities to improve practice from the perspective of instructional leaders is not giving feedback, but is hearing from teachers, understanding how teachers are thinking, how they are processing their students' needs and their formative assessment and thinking about their curriculum and how they're teaching their standards.

Like hearing teachers think out loud is one of the most important forms of evidence available to us as instructional leaders.

So I just did a webinar this past week on that.

It's called Feedback Fail.

And it's all about why feedback often does not accomplish what we think it will.

You can watch the recording of that webinar at principalcenter.com slash fail for just a few more days.

We're going to take that down because it goes in our members area.

But if you would like to see that webinar for free, you can go to principalcenter.com slash fail.

And I would love to know what you think about this idea of feedback as a conversation that doesn't have to have some sort of artificial format where there is a compliment followed by a suggestion followed by another compliment.

Like everybody knows what's coming.

And we just kind of smile and nod and get through it.

Everybody has their role to play.

And I'm convinced that that kind of thing, if there is no authentic conversation, is mostly a waste of time.

Let me know what you think.