Giving and receiving feedback is helpful for both of the individuals involved, and a high-feedback culture is good for everyone.
Under the best of circumstances, feedback-focused walkthroughs can lead to modest but continual improvements, as well as valuable professional learning for the instructional leader. Teacher coaching, in particular, is associated with student learning gains (Grissom et al., 2013). Giving and receiving feedback is helpful for both of the individuals involved, and a high-feedback culture is good for everyone. For new teachers, who may have multiple areas in which they can make rapid improvements, intensive feedback cycles can produce more substantial gains (Bambrick-Santoyo, 2012). The problem arises when educators push feedback-focused walkthroughs beyond the bounds of what they can reasonably accomplish; a law of diminishing returns applies to feedback. As teachers’ experience and expertise grow, less and less low-hanging fruit remains, and the instructional leader faces the unenviable challenge of needing to become increasingly critical in order to provide feedback for improvement. The situation worsens when instructional leaders see their role as one of catching and correcting all of the mistakes teachers are making in their typical teaching practice—taking on too much of the responsibility for professional growth that teachers and other instructional leaders should share. Rather than trying to correct individual decisions, we should seek to elicit and raise the level of teachers’ thinking about their instructional decision making through evidence-based conversations. Furthermore, we can often find the greatest leverage for improvement in schoolwide insights—such as patterns that we may need to address in professional development sessions for all staff—not in individual changes teachers make in response to feedback.
A more basic problem is perhaps the most commonly experienced flaw in feedback-focused walkthroughs: they’re unpleasant, and as a result, instructional leaders rarely do them (Grissom et al., 2013). Teachers face uninvited (and seemingly unnecessary) criticism, and administrators must assume the role of critic. This dynamic exists even if it’s masked by a high degree of professionalism. Teachers know they are required to “accept” feedback, even if they disagree with it, and supervisors know their presence is unwanted. The mandate to bring about continual improvement can propel the process only so far before resentment and avoidance set in.
Feedback-focused walkthroughs can also have unintended consequences. For example, teachers may learn to play the game of accepting feedback graciously in order to end the interaction as quickly as possible, without allowing the feedback to truly influence their thinking or practice. Given that the purpose of feedback is to improve teachers’ thinking and instructional decision making (Danielson, 2015), this is a serious limitation. Administrators are playing the game, too, providing feedback just for the sake of having something to say—even if it’s not helpful to the teacher. Over time, this can lead to an unfortunate cycle in which instructional leaders go to great lengths to give some sort of feedback, even when they know it is of poor quality, and teachers go to great lengths to pretend they value it. The more teachers pretend to benefit from feedback, the harder it is for instructional leaders to give truly useful feedback, and the cycle worsens—wasting everyone’s time and resulting in no meaningful improvement.
Does feedback have any value at all? Under the right circumstances, yes. Feedback can be helpful when:
These conditions are difficult for administrators to achieve on a consistent basis. Danielson (2015) notes that feedback can be validating and motivating for early career teachers, but for more experienced teachers, it “is even seen as a possible hindrance” (p. 10) to professional growth. It’s not surprising, then, that instructional coaching has emerged as a powerful alternative to supervisory classroom walkthroughs.
Instructional Coaching
Many administrators aspire to serve, first and foremost, as instructional coaches for their teachers, and only secondarily as evaluators. This is an admirable mindset, and one that leads to greater mutual benefit from both formal observations and informal classroom visits. However, we should be clear that supervisors, strictly speaking, can never be true coaches, due to the structural power they wield over teachers (Knight, 2011). The power differential between teachers and administrators has the potential to overshadow the focus on growth with its emphasis on evaluation (Danielson, 2015). Coaching requires a commitment to the client’s goals and a respect for confidentiality that shields the client from the potential negative consequences of taking risks. For example, a coach who is helping a teacher implement an ambitious new approach to project-based learning must refrain from filing negative reports if the teacher’s early attempts are unsuccessful in order to avoid discouraging further efforts. An instructional leader who is also the teacher’s evaluator can encourage risk taking but cannot promise to remain uninfluenced by what he or she sees in the classroom.
If you do serve as an instructional coach, you may find that the high-performance instructional leadership model is especially helpful for working with teachers who may be more defensive about their practice, thanks to its focus on evidence and shared criteria for quality. The coaching process can focus on the teacher’s goals but stay rooted in evidence of what actually took place.
Keep in mind that I designed this model to generate decisional information, and while some of that information should be protected by the confidentiality requirements of the coaching relationship, instructional coaches should present other issues to administrative staff for their consideration. For example, if teachers routinely complain that it is difficult to teach within a less-than-ideal bell schedule, you can provide this information to the administrator responsible for the schedule and seek a change, rather than merely helping teachers cope with it.
The Downey Walkthrough
A well-regarded approach known as the Downey Walkthrough, or the Three-Minute Classroom Walkthrough, bears more similarity to the high-performance instructional leadership model than the others in this chapter (Downey, Steffy, English, Frase, & Poston, 2004). Carolyn J. Downey and her colleagues (2004) recommend visiting classrooms very briefly—for just two or three minutes—to look for instructional decisions that may be of interest and to gain a sense of students’ orientation to their work. Because these visits are so brief, they can happen with great frequency, and because they usually involve no communication or follow-up with the teacher, they present relatively few barriers to implementation. Downey et al. (2004) recommend engaging teachers in reflective conversation “only when you know it will be received in a meaningful and timely manner” (p. 3), and taking only minimal notes in order to prompt recall of the most salient issues.
Compared to the Downey model, the high-performance instructional leadership model features a more consistent pattern of fewer, slightly longer visits each day, accompanied by more substantive and understanding-oriented, rather than coaching-oriented, conversations with teachers. Both models share a focus on instructional decision making rather than directive feedback. If you’ve been following the Downey model, you may find it relatively easy to transition to the high-performance instructional leadership model.
Learning Walks and Instructional Rounds
As they recognize the importance of spending time in classrooms, district- and system-level leaders are increasingly