Learner-Focused Feedback

19 Strategies to Observe for Impact

Amy Tepper, Patrick Flynn

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781544368269
• eBook ISBN: 9781544368276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

New strategies for feedback that supports a culture of learning

The skill set required for observing why students are learning and how teachers influence that is a difficult one to master—yet it's essential when it comes to driving change and growth in your school. This companion to Feedback to Feed Forward provides a curated collection of strategies to improve your ability to identify desired outcomes, recognize learning in action, collect relevant and accurate evidence, and develop smart, supportive, and effective feedback about a teacher's impact on learners.

And it's not just leaders, coaches, and administrators who can use this highly accessible how-to. This time around, Tepper and Flynn also address the needs of teachers who double as observers, whether they're mentoring new teachers, supporting each other or analyzing the effectiveness of their own teaching. No matter your role, you'll benefit from their expert guidance, as well as:

·         Authentic classroom examples
·         Observer think-alouds
·         Stories from the field with "Give-It-a-Try" tools and "Stop and Think" questions
·         Follow-up steps specific to your role 

When classroom observation and feedback are both learner-centered (focused on students) and learning-focused (focused on teachers as learners), they lead to a culture of learning throughout the school. Take this book as your guide, and explore just how effective your feedback can be.

Learner-Focused Feedback has been recognized for focusing on practices that have high effect sizes and will help you translate the groundbreaking Visible Learning research into practice. When educators use strategies that have high effects (greater than 0.40), they can accelerate student achievement. The power of the Visible Learning research lies in helping educators understand which factors have the highest impact on student achievement so that educators can begin making strategic decisions based on evidence that will utilize their time, energy, and resources to the best extent possible. The Visible Learning research is based on Professor John Hattie's unmatched meta-analysis of more than 1,600 research reviews comprising 95,000 studies, involving more than 300 million students—the world's largest evidence base on what works best in schools to improve student learning. From that research, Dr. Hattie identified more than 250 factors that have an impact on student achievement.  
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1 Why Observe for Impact?

“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”

—Socrates

Educators are a unique breed. We get up at the crack of dawn every day to make a difference, to kindle flames, to inspire, not just our students but our colleagues, our leaders, and teachers around us. If you are an educator reading this, you are seeking answers for how to make a greater difference in the lives of the learners around you, including yourself. You are working to drive change and promote growth, and we welcome you to this journey.

We wrote Feedback to Feed Forward (2019) with a sense of urgency in order to ensure that teachers everywhere received the high-quality feedback they needed and deserved and that their instructional leaders could develop the skills to provide that feedback. Readers of that book are now feeding forward, meaning their observation and feedback

• go beyond summarizing events to providing an analysis of effectiveness,
• allow teachers to accurately and clearly see how they are impacting learners, and
• lead to improved reflection, instructional practices, and student outcomes.

But we knew we had much more we could share. We wrote this new book to extend the skills of instructional leaders and concentrated on what we were noticing about continued skill gaps and challenge areas, responding to what those leaders were requesting of us—new strategies to build on their capacity, especially for the interaction with students during classroom visits. In addition, we are inviting a new reader—teachers who attend to student learning every day and who ideally support each other through peer-to-peer observations.

Frequent classroom observation and feedback—whether conducted by a supervisor, coach, department chair, or peer—that is learner centered (focused on our students) and learning focused (focused on the teacher as a learner) can drive change and growth in our schools. The skill set required for collecting evidence from students is a difficult one to master. We wrote this book to provide guidance for that work.

Here you will find nineteen strategies that will allow you to determine

• to what degree learning is occurring during lessons and, most importantly,
• why or how the teacher is impacting observed outcomes.

We expect whether you are a leader, coach, or teacher, you will find this book to be a highly accessible how-to guide. In several of our districts, teachers are participating in the same rigorous observation and feedback training as their leaders to ensure they too can serve as highly impactful supports. Beyond this, teachers who learn the skills of observation, evidence collection, and feedback and observe for learning in each other’s classrooms can refine practices for their own ongoing checks for understanding and develop a newfound awareness with their own students. You will begin to analyze student learning in action more extensively and recognize the instructional practices and environments that serve to increase levels of student engagement and deeper learning. These are the first steps toward the creation of a culture of learning in a school that drives the actions and beliefs of all who impact students’ lives each day.

Building a Culture of Learning

How can we ensure that teachers, coaches, leaders, and students are interacting within and supported by an environment of learning, ensuring a collective mission, purpose, and implementation towards student success?

We have been inspired by the educators who ensure that every experience (from the classroom and building to the district level) is focused on learning and what is best for learners. In order to understand and cultivate this type of culture of learning, we must first define school culture. Great Schools Partnership (2013), a leading school reform organization in the northeast United States, defines it as the beliefs, perceptions, relationships, attitudes, and written and unwritten rules that shape and influence every aspect of how a school functions.

In a school with a strong culture of learning

• ✔ There is a firmly rooted collective belief that everyone has the ability to learn (Hattie & Zierer, 2018)
• ✔ A growth mindset (Dweck, 2006) permeates the school halls and walls
• ✔ Staff’s perception of their current performance and understanding of their impact is accurate
• ✔ Staff and student relationships are based on a collaborative approach to learning
• ✔ Policies and procedures are designed through the lens of supporting systems and structures that ensure learning for all

A culture of observation and feedback drives a culture of learning. The strategies in this book directly support the first three items by building the capacity of all observers to provide accurate assessments of teacher effectiveness through observation and feedback. This collective ability, in turn, serves to promote the development of the fourth and fifth bulleted attributes. In Chapter 6, we leave you with specific suggestions related to all five attributes so that limitations in relationships, collaboration, or systems do not go unaddressed as these can surely impact the growth of a culture of learning.

Impacting Self-Belief

Fundamental to the establishment of a culture of learning, leaders and teachers must possess a belief in their own abilities related to student success. Albert Bandura (1994) defined self-efficacy as the belief in one’s capacity to execute the courses of action that will lead to attainment of an outcome or some achieved success. We know from Hattie (2017) (and our own time in classrooms) that the practice of building student self-efficacy leads to positive outcomes, with a significant effect size (.92). Through high-quality observation and feedback, we have found we can directly address and provide opportunities to promote what Bandura (1994) identifies as the four sources of self-efficacy. Let’s break down the relationships demonstrated in Figure 1.1.

Description

Figure 1.1: Pathways to Professional Growth

According to Bandura (1994), one’s self-efficacy is determined by the following:

• Mastery experiences: Opportunities to engage in actions with success. When we do something well, we continue to build our confidence and capacity.
• Vicarious experiences: Opportunities to witness others engaged in actions who are successful, especially those people we consider similar to ourselves.
• Social persuasion: Opportunities to receive boosts of verbal encouragement about our capacity to succeed.
• Emotional and physiological states: Opportunities to reduce the stress associated with potential failure and to improve physical and emotional states of mind and being.

As individuals experience or interact within each of these contexts, they experience increases in motivation and performance, along with a positive affect.

As we are seeking to support teachers’ self-efficacy through our approaches to observation and feedback, we must seek to draw conclusions with teachers about the causal attributions—or how they are causing or impacting observed student outcomes. These moments, over time, can act as efficacy boosters. For example, an observer may help a teacher understand how her use of a small-group intervention during a math workshop increased the number of students able to successfully complete independent work. This provides her with a new level of understanding as she engages in that strategy again and an increased level of efficacy from the mastery experience. If she is provided with an opportunity to see others engage in that same teaching strategy vicariously, she is now seeing it with a new level of understanding and so on. New learning becomes cyclical in its influence on efficacy. Teachers become more aware of and empowered by an understanding of causal attributions (impact). They recognize what is within their control, and self-efficacy increases.

Unfortunately, many teachers receive often cursory, general, or nonactionable feedback in the form of a summary of teaching that does not promote reflection or analysis of impact as a result of observations, and this can set them up for failure. They may be given action steps or be told to differentiate—an enormous endeavor for most—without being provided with the necessary data to reflect on or discuss which students require differentiation and why, nor any support or resources as to how to meet those students’ needs. To differentiate is not a bite-sized and attainable next step (nor is “develop clear and rigorous learning targets” or “turn learning over to students”).

Though never an observer’s intent, you can actually decrease efficacy through feedback. This will occur when teachers who seek to grow do not know how to move forward or recognize why they need to make a specific change. Additionally, you can diminish belief in ability when teachers lack a clear understanding of necessary building blocks or long-term steps to achieve desired outcomes. The real diminisher can lie in a lack of understanding in how long it might take for new instructional practices to become refined to fully influence student outcomes.

It is more difficult to instill high beliefs of personal efficacy by social persuasion alone than to undermine it. Unrealistic boosts in efficacy are quickly disconfirmed by disappointing results of one’s efforts. But people who have been persuaded that they lack capabilities tend to avoid challenging activities that cultivate potentialities and give up quickly in the face of difficulties. By constricting activities and undermining motivation, disbelief in one’s capabilities creates its own behavioral validation. Successful efficacy builders do more than convey positive appraisals. In addition to raising people’s beliefs in their capabilities, they [observers/feedback providers] structure situations for them in ways that bring success and avoid placing people in situations prematurely where they are likely to fail often (Bandura, 1994).

Two important lessons should be derived from this research as you begin your journey toward creating a culture of learning through observation and feedback. We can increase teachers’ levels of self-efficacy if we do the following:

• ✔ Devote energy and resources toward building the skill set of the observer to ensure high-quality observations are rooted in specific evidence and lead to honest, specific, and practical feedback. Up to this point, we are consistently failing observers by inserting them into a feedback cycle without proper training and ongoing support—hence the urgency for both Feedback to Feed Forward (2019) and this book.
• ✔ Recognize and convey to all stakeholders that the consistent execution of high-quality observations and feedback within a cycle will take time to establish and that no shift in culture within a school occurs simply or without challenge.

Impacting Collective Belief

We know that we are more powerful together. We also know from Goddard, Hoy, and Hoy (2004) and John Hattie (2017) that collective teacher efficacy—a collective belief of teachers in their ability to positively affect students—has a significant effect size (1.57) and is, in fact, the greatest influence on student achievem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgements
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Online Resources
• Feedback to Feed Forward Strategies
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• 1 Why Observe for Impact?
• 2 What Do You Need to Understand About Learning?
• 3 How Can You Prepare for Evidence Collection?
• 4 How Can You Adapt Evidence Collection Upon Arrival?
• 5 How Can You Adapt Evidence Collection as a Lesson Unfolds?
• 6 How Do You Cultivate a Culture of Learning?
• Strategies List
• List of Figures
• References
• Index
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