A practical, research-based guide for ensuring trustworthy classroom observations that provide teachers with meaningful feedback
Better Feedback for Better Teaching is an essential resource for school, district, and state, leaders committed to high-quality classroom observations. This practical guide outlines the knowledge and skills classroom observers need to identify and help develop effective teaching, and explains how leaders can best facilitate the development of classroom observers.
The best way to ensure high quality instruction in every classroom is to provide teachers with accurate, constructive feedback on practices proven to enhance student learning. Skilled classroom observers help teachers do their best work, so that they can guide students to their greatest potential. Better Feedback for Better Teaching provides helpful, reliable strategies from leading experts and practitioners involved in the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, which carried out one of the largest, most influential studies of classroom observations to date.
Among the many topics covered, Better Feedback for Better Teaching describes how to:
Build a shared vision of effective teacher feedback among observers
Ensure a common understanding of a classroom observation tool
Train observers to collect objective evidence from a lesson, efficiently and free of bias
Leverage data to improve how observers are trained and supported
This comprehensive resource includes helpful starting points, as well as tips to refine techniques and address new challenges. Each section combines clear explanations of key ideas with concrete, adaptable examples and strategies.
Self-assessments are included to help you quickly rank current needs and find the most relevant solutions. Filled with valuable, practical tools, Better Feedback for Better Teaching helps educators cultivate high-quality classroom observations that improve teaching and learning.
Frequently asked questions
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access Better Feedback for Better Teaching by Jeff Archer, Steven Cantrell, Steven L. Holtzman, Jilliam N. Joe, Cynthia M. Tocci, Jess Wood in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Education & Education Teaching Methods. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Chapter 1 Building Support for Better Observer Training
Essential Question How Will You Make the Case for Robust Training?
You might wonder why observers need any significant training to provide teachers with accurate and meaningful feedback. After all, most principals and instructional leaders have extensive experience in education. They have long used classroom visits as part of their process for conducting teacher performance reviews. They believe they know good teaching when they see it. Why would they need anything more than their best judgment to accurately evaluate classroom practice? For that matter, why wouldn't some feel their expertise is being questioned by the suggestion that it's not enough?
But longstanding traditions in our profession have masked the extent to which we lack a shared vision of effective teaching and effective feedback. Instructional leaders often think they agree on what good teaching looks like, but that perceived agreement hasn't been tested, nor has it mattered if it didn't exist. Until recently, classroom visits by evaluators were infrequent and of little consequence. They were rarely based on clear or research-based criteria, and the results were almost never analyzed to see if they indicated what they were supposed to. There was little expectation that observations be followed by coaching that changes teacher practice. Now all that's changing. Today, we recognize that teaching drives student learning more than any other factor that schools control. Thus the premium on identifying and developing effective teaching has greatly increased.
When principals and other observers recognize the relevant indicators of a lesson's quality, they are better able to explain a teacher's ratings and how to improve them.
Think about what happens when observations fail to produce credible results and meaningful feedback. In most states, observations now count for half or more of a teacher's overall evaluation, and those evaluations increasingly factor into personnel decisions. Teachers are rightfully concerned when their job performance is determined using different standards, both across schools and within them. Moreover, students pay a price. Teachers cannot improve their practice when they receive inaccurate or confusing feedback. The lack of effective feedback creates an environment that discourages top-performing teachers from wanting to stay. In a study of highly effective teachers, The New Teacher Project (TNTP) found that regular, quality feedback was among the factors that determine how long such teachers plan to stay at their schools.3
Finally, observation results often are the only window a school system has into the state of teaching in its classrooms. Without accuracy, it's impossible to know what supports teachers need, or if those supports are working.
There's no magic number for how many hours of training are needed to ensure accuracy and meaningful feedback. But it's safe to say observer training will take school leaders away from their myriad other duties for dozens of hours over the course of a year (at least when they're first trained), and that some observers will take more time, and more reteaching, to get through it. In addition, trainers must be paid. If you use an online off-the-shelf program, you'll pay user fees. And if you build your own training from scratch, there's the significant cost of development: engaging a team to plan and pilot, acquiring video and pre-scoring it, and creating new materials. You need to make a clear case to stakeholders for making such a big investment.
You make the case for training with evidence. Revealing differences in interpretation builds an appreciation of the challenge that training helps address. Ask groups of instructional leaders to rate a video of teaching using your instrument's rubric, and then have them compare the ratings they gave for each teaching component and the evidence they used to determine the rating. The result may be disagreements, or even debates, between the raters. The point is not to question anyone's expertise, but to surface potential inconsistencies that might cause teachers to lose confidence in the observation process and the feedback they receive. Another way to make the case that different standards are being applied is to compare rating distributions across schools and districts. This may show that in some places large numbers of teachers are rated highly effective, while in others almost none are.
But consistency alone is not a strong sell. It is hard to justify the time and resources needed to implement quality observations if the only results are more accurate ratings of teachers' practice. Stakeholders need to see how training benefits their work. When principals and other observers recognize the relevant indicators of a lesson's quality, they are better able to explain a teacher's ratings and how to improve them. School leaders are eager for training that's focused on instruction and that helps them give meaningful feedback. When this effective feedback results in improvement, teachers place a higher value on the source of that feedback, and school leaders are more motivated to provide quality feedback going forward. The message that training makes evaluators better coaches will increase their investments.
Stakeholder groups and school system leaders also need to see observation as professional learning. Although the cost of robust observer training may be higher than what school systems spent in the past on evaluation, it's miniscule when compared with the dollars spent on professional development. By some measures, the overall expense of evaluation in districts with robust observer training is equal to about 1 percent of the total cost of teacher compensation (that includes the expense of other evaluation components, like student surveys, though observations cost more due to the training and time involved).4 As professional development, observations are a modest investment, with great potential for return.
In Focus: Empirical Evidence for Making the Case
The case for observer training isn't just rhetorical. It's empirical. Recent studies have shown students have greater gains in learning when their teachers receive effective observations and effec...
Table of contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Bill & Melinda Gates foundation
Introduction: Getting from Here to There
Part I: Making the Big Decisions
Part II: Pre-Scoring Video
Part III: Building the Knowledge and Skills for Observation
Part IV: Using Data to Improve Training and Support of Observers
