Giving and getting feedback in real time

Real-time feedback closes the gap between rehearsal and reality.

“You’ll have 10 minutes,” first-year teacher Jackson Tobin tells his 2nd graders. “You can start your writing . . . now.” The classroom grows hushed as each student takes pencil to paper.

Only then does Nikki Bridges, Tobin’s principal, beckon him to join her at the back of the room. “When you scan the room,” she whispers, so discreetly that not one student looks up, “you need to notice when students are off-task. Just now, when you were giving directions, Kimani was not paying attention to you. Now I’m going to stand over here, and if I put my hand over a student’s head, like this, that means make eye contact, tell them what to do, and don’t move until they do it. OK?”

“OK,” Tobin whispers back. Minutes later, when he’s reviewing the independent practice with students, one student kicks at the legs of her desk and gazes toward the door. Bridges signals Tobin. The student doesn’t notice, but Tobin does.

Tobin pauses mid-sentence to make eye contact with the student. “Feet on the floor and eyes up here,” he says quietly but firmly. When the student complies, Tobin scans the rest of the room, taking one more moment to make sure he has every child’s attention. “We know what a city is,” he then proceeds. “What’s the next biggest? State or country?”

In today’s teaching world, what Tobin and Bridges just did is extremely radical. An unspoken agreement in the profession calls for a leader in the classroom to be a silent observer and considers interference with a teacher while teaching to be a breach of respect. Real-time feedback is almost unheard of.

Real-time feedback is the only way we can show new teachers how great teaching feels in action.

Imagine, though, if we took this same attitude in the surgical operating room. When residents perform surgery for the first time, they don’t do it alone: There’s a more experienced doctor on hand to tell them how to do every step as well as possible. We’d never want it any other way because the patient’s life cannot be put at risk by a learning experience.

We entrust doctors with the physical lives of their patients. Similarly, we entrust the educational lives of children to their teachers. Every second in the operating room is critical, and every moment in the classroom matters for learning. If we assume new surgeons will need in-the-moment guidance, then we must believe it’s equally constructive to offer real-time feedback to new teachers.

Real-time feedback is the only way we can show new teachers how great teaching feels in action. When we model teaching techniques, we’re merely showing them how it looks. When we get them to role-play those techniques, they discover how it feels, but only from the safety of the office or the conference room. “There’s no substitute for when the kids are actually in the room,” Tobin said. When Bridges gives him feedback in real time, it closes the gap between rehearsal and reality.

First, be noninvasive

When surgery is necessary, it’s best for it to be as noninvasive as possible. Giving real-time feedback is strikingly similar. Think back to Bridges’ real-time feedback to Tobin — it never disrupted the flow of the lesson, and not a single student even realized it was being given. That’s ideal as the teacher continues to own all the actions in the classroom. When the situation is something slightly more interactive, other respectful strategies are available.

Let’s walk through three levels of noninvasive feedback, starting with not saying a word and ending with making your voice heard respectfully.

Level 1: Communicate nonverbally.

Remember how Bridges silently gestured with her hand to let Tobin know which students weren’t paying attention? If you know in advance what you want to guide the teacher to do in real time, you can arrange nonverbal signals like these with the teacher before you arrive in the classroom. That way you reduce the chance you’ll need to interrupt the teacher during the lesson. For example, one administrator held up a red card to indicate when a teacher was doing too much of the talking and needed to involve students.

Level 2: When you must talk to the teacher, do it during independent practice — and keep it short.

There is no better time to talk to the teacher than while students are engaged in independent practice. If you speak softly and give quick, crystal-clear directions, you’ll call almost as little attention to yourself as if you’d communicated nonverbally.

Level 3: When you must speak during the class, raise your hand.

Giving the teacher the chance to call on you — just as he or she would call on a student — allows the teacher to give you the floor while maintaining leadership of the classroom. Then, when you address the class, direct your clear instructions to students, rather than the teacher. (For example, you could model a technique to check for understanding: “Class, I’m curious — who chose answer A on the worksheet? How about answer B?”) At Level 3, debriefing with the teacher after the lesson is especially critical in order to make sure he or she understands why you acted when you did. (“I polled the class so that going into the next part of your lesson, you’d know who was comprehending what you’d taught up to that point. How did that affect your teaching for the rest of the hour?”)

If you can’t fix it now, save it for later

Although real-time feedback is useful, it’s not the right tool for every situation. When you’re observing a class, you may see many challenges that affect student learning and are important to address but can’t be addressed effectively by real-time feedback. Situations in which feedback is better delivered outside the classroom include:

Even at its most respectful, real-time feedback may feel awkward at first.

When the feedback is unrelated to the teacher’s primary professional development goals.

Let’s say you’ve been working with a teacher on responding to student error with effective follow-up questioning. If you see a management issue in that teacher’s classroom, bringing it up in real time may distract the teacher from the technique he or she is currently trying to master.

When the feedback is too unwieldy for the teacher to tackle on the fly.

Feedback is always most effective when it’s broken down into bite-sized steps. This is especially true of real-time feedback. Imagine, for example, that a teacher is working on keeping her most challenging students engaged and invested, and one student is proving so challenging that the techniques the teacher has learned aren’t working. The skill of re-engaging a student in that situation is complex enough that a teacher likely couldn’t experience success through in-the-moment feedback.

When the feedback would derail the lesson you’re observing.

This is especially relevant as many schools strive to develop lessons that are aligned with Common Core objectives. If you realize when you get to a teacher’s classroom that his or her lesson plan is not Common Core-aligned, working on lesson planning with the teacher outside of class would be an appropriate measure to take, but correcting the teacher in-the-moment wouldn’t be effective because students would lose more learning to a derailed lesson than to a nonaligned lesson.

Even at its most respectful, real-time feedback may feel awkward at first. While you can minimize the discomfort by letting new teachers know in advance that you may give them feedback when you’re observing their lessons, the only way to truly normalize real-time feedback is to do it regularly, treating it as a routine part of most teachers’ development.

When his first year of teaching was just over halfway finished, Tobin attested to the power of concrete, real-time feedback. “That’s what’s most effective for me,” he said. By then, Tobin’s growth was evident to anyone who observed him at work. He wasn’t just maintaining excellent classroom management throughout the day, but also doing it with transparent joy.

For Tobin — and for many other teachers — workshops and rehearsals are helpful, but that aha understanding of what it’s really like to be a master teacher in action comes from getting expert feedback in the moment they need it the most.  Just as we do with budding surgeons, when we offer teachers such direct professional guidance, they and their students reap the benefits for years to come.

CITATION: Bambrick-Santoyo, P. (2013). IN PRACTICE LEADERSHIP: Giving and getting feedback in real time. Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (4), 72-73.