The Virtues of Feedback

While working in my former school district, an informal supervisor and mentor came to visit my classroom per my request. I contacted her, desperate, after several rough days of challenges with managing a group of unruly ninth graders. She came to visit and observed my class. The tone of the room was drab; I was at once too timid to confront the students (for fear of them talking back) and too reserved to inject enthusiasm into my lesson (for fear of riling the students up beyond my ability to manage them). As certain students rather blatantly disrespected me, my mentor sat at the back of the room, jotting notes. I circulated among groups of students; some eagerly tackled their assignments, while others did not.

After the class, my mentor addressed the problem through a method of inquiry. "Why didn't you respond when this student insulted you?" She's six months pregnant, I replied--she has a lot happening to her, and I find it best not to bother her. "Why didn't you write this student up after he refused to participate?" He just returned from a suspension and is on his last leg, I replied. A write-up could send him to alternative school, which would do nothing to help him. "Okay." She paused, briefly, before pointing to another student's desk: "How about her? What excuse do you have for her?"

Silenced, I ceded the moment to her. Calmly, respectfully, and tactfully, she informed me of the stakes. "I'm not your boss. I struggled when I started, and I understand that this profession takes finesse and takes time. I appreciate the time and creativity that went into this lesson. But I also want to make it clear that, if someone with more authority than me and less patience sat in on your class six, eight, or ten months from now and saw what I saw today, you would have a lot more to worry about." She continued: "I also know that, because you sought out our help, that you already know that." My attitude properly adjusted, we then shifted into a conversation about what measures I could take, beginning the next day, to get my class in line.

This collaborative give-and-take allowed me to become a better teacher more attuned to my students' actual needs and assertive in my classroom performance. I learned from her a sense of what it means to be a frank-but-compassionate aid to pedagogical wisdom.

Why High School Teachers Don't Seek Feedback...

In education, observations often have stakes. They often are explicitly punitive or based on job retention. The people employed to conduct observations generally have some say or role in determining whether the observed teacher keeps his or her job. For this reason, teachers don't usually seek to elicit people from the very people who might be best positioned and best informed to give it.

When the pressure of performance reviews is taken away, matters work much better. As a staff trainer for Teach For America for two summers, I helped teachers through more difficult circumstances than any college freshman could possibly concoct. I did so as a guide and coach; I had no authority to directly "fire" the teachers, and my relationship with them depended on this lack of direct authority.

From this position, I guided teachers through the challenges of overcoming passivity, developing activity-centered lessons, engaging students, fostering a positive culture, establishing norms of conduct, and all of the other countless considerations that implicate a teacher's lesson on a daily basis. These new educators sought out and took advantage of literally every second of my time during these training periods. Confronted, daily, by the harsh realities of the classroom, and the looming knowledge that at least two years of teaching lie before them, they needed candid, direct feedback--and quickly.

... And Why College Instructors Don't Seek Feedback

As college instructors, we do not have this level of pressure upon us. Students will endure a poorly-designed, boring, PowerPoint-based 90-minute lecture peacefully and respectfully (while privately resenting everything about it). As a result, the pressure to get better just isn't there, at least not on a desperate day-to-day basis. Compared to high school teachers, we have considerably less oversight (thank God!), which gives us the blessing of creative freedom but the curse of a lack of constructive feedback. And as we become overwhelmed--either by our large number of teaching sections, our complicated personal lives, or our own mountain of classwork to complete--the first thing we abandon are efforts at our own professional development.

My Feedback Philosophy

This semester, I availed myself of "formal" observation responsibilities in the hopes of conducting better and more candid observations. Rather than entering the classroom with the sense that something I write, say, or report could be used against you, I instead endeavor to observe classes as a peer, a fellow instructor who is in this with you, as someone who can learn as much from you as you can learn from me.

As a person who grew up with ADD, I have a keen sense of what it means to be bored and distracted from a lesson. I can sense it quite explicitly when students have become disinterested in a lesson. I also, after working with rambunctious high school students for six hours a day for two straight years, have a deep and nuanced understanding of what it means for a lesson to break down and fall apart.

I am versed in feedback processes designed to help consider the lesson from the student's perspective and evaluate it, retrospectively, from their standpoint. I aim not just to help you design your next lesson better, but to help you develop habits of mind and self-reflection that will make you a better teacher even when no one is around helping you.

I want to be in your classrooms, interacting with your students, taking notes, and breaking down your lessons via email. I want this because developing a strong Oral Communication Program at our university requires cultivating a community of people willing to seek out answers and help from one another.

And so, I implore you: Unless you are inspiring students to take charge of their voices and recognize the way communication structures their world on a daily basis; unless you are transforming our students into the best collegiate communicators on the face of the planet; unless every student comes out of your classroom with the oratorical sensibilities of Martin Luther King, Jr.--you have room to improve. That should be all of us, myself included. So reach out and let's set up a time for me to come see you.

Michael