Crafting the Feedback Teachers Need and Deserve

A Guide for Leaders

Thomas M. Van Soelen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317362388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Crafting the Feedback Teachers Need and Deserve illuminates an often overlooked aspect of educational leadership: providing quality written feedback. This resource offers context, purpose, and techniques on how to capture and write beneficial feedback. Proven in school districts, Van Soelen's strategies will accelerate improvement in classroom practice and result in teachers who crave feedback and use it to supervise themselves. Full of examples and complete with an assessment tool to gauge current practice, this book shares insights into providing effective observation and feedback within any teacher evaluation system.

Meet the Author

Dr. Thomas M. Van Soelen enjoys creating and participating in collaborative experiences everywhere he goes. Currently, as the president of Van Soelen & Associates, a professional development and leadership coaching consulting firm based in Lawrenceville, Georgia, Thomas influences schools and school districts that are ethnically, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse. His client list includes organizations in Georgia (e.g., Gwinnett County Public Schools, Fulton County Schools, Georgia State Superintendent Association), Texas (e.g., Lewisville Independent School District (ISD), Garland ISD, Arlington ISD, Fort Worth ISD, Learning Forward Texas), and in Canada and Guyana.

His primary areas of expertise include teacher evaluation, instructional coaching, leadership development, and learning communities. In particular, Thomas prepares district, school, and teacher leaders to organize effective and efficient collaborative sessions, focused on student learning using structured conversations called protocols, promulgated through the School Reform Initiative.

Prior to this entrepreneurial venture, Thomas worked in multiple states and in public and private schools, teaching every grade level from pre-kindergarten through graduate school at some point in his career. His most recent school district leadership position was functioning as the associate superintendent in the City Schools of Decatur, Georgia, a post he held for eight years. During that time, he began a gathering of principals engaged in critical friendship through the School Reform Initiative. This voluntary group first met in 2010 and still regularly meets to learn with and from each other.

Thomas, his wife, and their two sons live near Atlanta, where Thomas now enters his third decade as a church musician, leading choirs and playing piano and organ.

1 Shining the Light in the Dark

DOI: 10.4324/9781315668864-1

This book stems from a five-year inquiry in the City Schools of Decatur (CSD), Georgia. CSD is a public school system in metro Atlanta ranking as one of the largest 600 school districts in the United States with approximately 4,250 learners in kindergarten through grade 12 and another 350 children in an early learning center (birth to age four). In the early 2000s, the community reported high-performing schools, but a lack of disaggregated data shielded parents and educators from a significant achievement gap—in some content areas, triple the national average.

As school reform models and instructional improvements were implemented through a widespread strategic plan, the lackluster teacher evaluation plan initially remained untouched. Although the strategic plan seemed to generate immediate spikes in achievement, the pace of student growth slowed. Focus turned to the adults, and teacher evaluation was in the crosshairs.

As the current reality was defined, it became increasingly clear that not only was the teacher evaluation process unrigorous, it was not used with fidelity. As teacher-level data was examined, very little difference emerged in the evaluation practices and results of two teachers with sizable achievement differences. Upon reading and studying, this wasn't shocking: “A review in 2008 of teacher evaluations in [Hillsborough County, Florida] found that more than 99% of the 12,000 teachers were rated as satisfactory or outstanding, and nearly half of high school teachers received perfect scores” (von Frank, 2011).

The priority was determined and time carved out. District leaders used strategies that had previously worked in other areas of school improvement:

• Reading professional texts defining terms such as learning targets and assessment
• Observing classrooms in pairs
• Working slowly, not implementing everything immediately

As the observational prowess seemed to improve, district leaders heard from faculty. “Outspoken teachers appreciated the increased feedback frequency but desired qualitative responses as well. Some even pointed to one of the teaching standards that delineated the criteria of effective written and verbal feedback for student learners, questioning our premise of explicitly modeling these standards in our own work with adults” (Van Soelen, 2013). Said in another way: “You expect us to write high-quality feedback for our students; you aren't writing high-quality feedback for us.”

Inter-Rater Reliability Is Not Enough

New teacher evaluation systems often breed needs for school leaders to calibrate their evaluation ratings across observers. Sometimes this work happens in individual schools, other times across a school district. These sorts of healthy debates and shared focus can prove positive: inter-rater reliability can grow. Unique models like cross-school teacher evaluation can greatly accelerate this outcome (Van Soelen, 2012).

However, growing in alignment did not meet teachers’ articulated need for high-quality feedback—it simply meant that Decatur teachers were experiencing evaluations that were more consistent across the district.

It is that inquiry which was developed into an assessment tool, and eventually, this book. By this point, the Decatur professional development group had grown, now including at least one teacher leader from each school. These outstanding teachers helped the group see that the rubric ratings (1–4) had limited impact: they might spur a teacher to more thoroughly read the rubric, but without written narrative feedback, teachers are left to wonder what evidence really informed the rating.

It was risky to have such an integrated group of teachers and leaders, but it paid great dividends. An even larger risk was looming as the first video clip was queued up: we were going to show each other our written feedback.

Using electronic tools, such as PollEverywhere.com and Google Forms, leaders wrote feedback and clicked “submit” for all to see.

A Spotlight

A principal described the experience best: “A spotlight has just been shined in a dark corner.” Remember the course sequence of leadership preparation programs? Even 20 years of being a principal doesn't necessarily improve your written feedback. A similarly faulty analogy would be that your swimming strokes will improve by simply standing in water more frequently.

Although increasing quantity does not necessarily equate with improved aptitude, risk can become less risky the more often you engage in it or with it. And so it happened with sharing our feedback. The anonymity of the web-based tools assisted with the risk-taking, as did strategic partnering both during professional development sessions and during shared classroom observations in the cross-school teacher evaluation processes. More detail on Decatur's story is available (Van Soelen, 2013).

After repeated failed attempts to create a high-quality feedback rubric, one group searched for another tool that would meet their outcomes. They stumbled upon an Innovation Configuration Map.

An Innovation Configuration Map (Hord, et al., 2006) was chosen to codify what we defined as high-quality feedback because Innovation Configurations elucidate concepts and make seemingly invisible practices explicit while also setting expectations within an array of variations. Innovation Configurations emerged from the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (Hord, et al., 1987), describing an innovation in action while the Innovation Configuration Map clarifies what the innovation looks like across a continuum of practice.

(Van Soelen, 2013, p. 28)

The finished product is represented as Table 1.1. Each row lists a desired outcome in the first column with a corresponding purpose. The first draft included the first four desired outcomes, emerging from the group's professional development sessions and teacher feedback. As the group continued to learn together, analysis of written feedback and leader reflections identified writing feedback in co-teaching situations as the growing edge for this group. After exploring the content of co-teaching and then writing feedback in co-teaching situations, the last two desired outcomes were crafted.

Table 1.1 High-Quality Feedback Innovation Configuration Map

	1	2	3	4
DescriptionPurpose: to see and hear what's going on in a classroom	Feedback is highly descriptive, balancing rich descriptions of student behaviors and teacher behaviors. Feedback includes data that was seen and heard, using direct quotations when appropriate.“Three students put their heads down during the 10-minute movie, near the 6-minute mark. You remained at the back of the room speaking once to a student. It appeared that 10 students wrote something down. One student near the door used a Flow Map.”	Feedback is mostly descriptive, including approximations for wh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Meet the Author
• Appendix