Coaching Your Classroom by Hillman Garnet;Stalets Mandy;

Author:Hillman, Garnet;Stalets, Mandy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Solution Tree
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Perry Finch, Middle School Principal

Blackhawk Middle School’s grassroots movement to focus on instructional feedback for students began because we felt the feedback that we gave our students should be positive and supportive, not punitive and demotivating. Prior to developing assessment literacy, Blackhawk teachers created units of study that had assessments and activities based on the Common Core State Standards. As teachers developed assessment literacy, they began giving students disaggregated feedback on individual learning in their day-to-day instruction instead of giving each student a single aggregated score. From this continuous standards-based feedback came evidence that students were reacting positively to the change. At that time, Mary Peterson, a seventh-grade mathematics teacher, shared students “are seeing some success, I think, and I don’t see the sad faces the same way as when they get a grade. For some reason I think that they are not comparing themselves to one another. It’s based on how they’ve improved or not” (Finch, 2016).

Our district had been participating in instructional rounds for over seven years when Blackhawk chose to focus on feedback for our problem of practice (City, Elmore, Fiarman, & Teitel, 2011). Our problem of practice included the statement: We are not offering clarity in our instruction as far as the feedback we provide students nor are we giving them clear direction in which to act on that feedback to maximize student learning. We wanted to do a deep dive into the different types of feedback that can occur in a classroom and see what feedback we were offering our students. We also wanted to home in on the most important aspect of feedback—what students do differently when they receive it.

Much like our earlier work with success criteria, our new discussions led us to examine the different forms of feedback. Initially our instructional rounds team broke down feedback into two categories: (1) procedural (process specific) and (2) evaluative (task specific). In year two of our focus on the problem of practice, we continued to refine our study of feedback to differentiate the flow or source of feedback. We looked at several important feedback-flow relationships: student-to-student, student-to-teacher, or the traditional teacher-to-student feedback. The team used staff meetings to openly discuss feedback in each of these different relationships and to discuss the components of feedback. We wanted to increase time spent on instruction and learning in our whole-group gatherings, and we did so by better utilizing the staff meetings. The instructional rounds team members crafted a feedback data collection form that they shared with every teacher in our school, informing all teachers of the nuances in feedback that we were looking for in our classroom observations. The form includes questions classroom observers might ask students, such as Did you do something with that feedback?

As this process progressed, instructional rounds team members were able to capture actual evidence of feedback occurring during instruction and then share these examples with our teachers. Teachers benefitted from having a regular focus on feedback and from hearing ideas they could borrow or augment to improve how they provide their students with feedback.

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