I’m typing this at the Palm Springs Convention Center during CMC-South, the California Mathematics Council conference. It’s been a highlight of my professional year every year of my career, and I’m—frankly—kinda surprised that math teachers are still taking value from my thoughts on subjects related to math education.
Patricia Vandenberg and I worked remotely to prepare this 90-minute workshop, and since many folks were taking pictures and asking questions, I figure I ought to gather everything in a central location (besides this Twitter thread).
The Problem – Why Give Feedback
I’ve been running sound for about 20 years, and if you’ve been in the room with a microphone before, the odds are pretty good that you’ve heard feedback. As a sound technician, there’s only bad feedback. If you hear a feedback loop, something is wrong.
I spent lots of years teaching in schools like that, where I was out here doing my best, but I would only hear from the admin if there was a problem, and would assume things were fine when they never visited me.
When staff feel empowered to give and receive feedback, they appreciate the culture of continuous improvement, and they’re less annoyed to get negative feedback.
The only way to improve our practices is for someone else to offer feedback and for us to receive it and improve. It ain’t fun, it’s uncomfortable, but teachers and leaders can grow accustomed to that culture of continuous improvement.
Anybody with a spouse or partner or roommate knows how it feels to get feedback that’s challenging and uncomfortable. It doesn’t feel good to fail. But every failure is an opportunity to reflect and grow, and the vulnerability it takes to receive feedback is what makes us better teachers and better spouses/partners/roommates.
How and When
When structuring feedback, there are four general steps that most people use (taken from Peter Foster here):
For example:
1.) Your students were seated for 53 minutes and you were speaking at the board for the first 30, including seven example problems.
2.) While you know the most in the room about adding and subtracting integers, the students don’t always need you to figure stuff out.
3.) Your students’ behavior and noise level got worse and louder as the period went on, likely because they were getting tired of sitting and listening
4.) Next lesson, break up your instruction time into pair-share, peer teaching, groups at the whiteboards, and also single out the students who are loud and off-task.
This works for students, too: “You divided both sides by negative 6, and you were probably expecting an integer answer. Are you sure that 712 divides into -6 evenly? Check with a calculator.”
If those four steps are the what feedback looks like, then Jen Abrams has the how to structure feedback handled in her book.
Her book (Having Hard Conversations) is a manual for people who struggle to tend to the emotions around a hard conversation. She also drops this line, which is too good not to share:
As a White educator working in a mostly Black and brown school, I often use lines like this to focus on connecting actions and intentions.
Another favorite of mine is to separate intent from impact. For example, “I recognize that wasn’t your intent to use language with a racist history, but the impact of your words made several students uncomfortable and their families called me about it.”
As an Assistant Principal, I use a similar structure with students.
I know you didn’t mean to threaten Hailey at lunch, but when you walked up to her with a group of friends and asked why she was talking crap about you, it definitely felt threatening to her and her friend.
Promising Practice #1 – Feedback Form
Both Patricia and I prefer the term “Promising Practices” to “best practices,” since students and schools change every year and “best” won’t be on top of the podium for very long.
Early in my career, I worked at a charter school and my growth had plateued, since no admin or peer had the time to give me feedback. On the copy machine I found a Teacher Report Card and gave it to my students to offer anonymous feedback. Over the years, it grew more sophisticated, and both Patricia and I gave it to our students as teacher and as an Instructional Coach, and I now give it to my staff as an Admin.
Promising Practice #2 – ObserveMe
Teachers inviting people into their classrooms and naming the aspects of their practice they’d like feedback on. More on that can be found on Robert Kaplinksy’s website here.
Promising Practice #3 – Ask for Feedback Directly
Candra Loftis The principal at my kids’ elementary school is a rockstar. She came to us as a middle-school assistant principal, and I sat down with her to hear more about that process.
She told me that—the first few months she was there—she met with every staff member and had some variation of these two conversations:
Mrs. Loftis modeled a vulnerability and a “flattening” of the power structure by asking for direct feedback from the staff that work for her. Who wouldn’t want to contribute to a school culture under a principal as awesome as that?
Next Steps and Troubleshooting
Both Patricia and I have attended CMC, heard great ideas, taken them back to the classroom on Monday and they… didn’t work the way we expected.
We carved out time in the 90-minute workshop to discuss common problems with feedback and how to address them, then gave the attendees some time to plan for Monday.
1.) Not getting enough feedback? Show people that you’re acting on the feedback you do get. People who didn’t offer their feedback the first time will be more likely to do so if they know you’re listening.
2.) Not getting accurate feedback? Don’t take it personally. If you break all possible feedback into 4 quadrants, it might look like the diagram below, and only the feedback in quadrants I and II deserves your attention.
I blogged more about that four years ago here.
3.) Not getting critical feedback? You’re too awesome and not taking enough risks with new ideas. If you’ve been in my workshop or read this blog before, you know that “Take a risk” is a persistent theme for me.
Summary
The students are looking to the teacher to model how to handle feedback. They want to see how adults respond when they’re wrong, how we fail, make mistakes, and get better. And the math class is a great place to practice iterating and improving.
For leaders, we can model that same risk-taking, that same vulnerable response to feedback. We can model a culture of continuous improvement, soliciting and acting on feedback.
Works Cited
