We feed back to colleagues to help them reflect and improve. It can be positive feedback (acknowledging strengths, efforts and achievements), or critical feedback (what could be improved in their behaviours and actions). Feedback is at the heart of a long-lasting and successful career. Without feedback, we may forever be stuck with the skillset and mindset we have in this moment. We are more likely to plateau, rather than improve. Without feedback, says Joseph Folkman, we are flying blind.
I walk lots of school corridors listening to leaders, who narrate their daily diet of feedback:
– I need to have that chat with X,
– That child’s parents met with me last week – it was a tough conversation
– I must thank that teaching assistant for the way they supported that child,
– We need to be stronger as a staff on that practice.
The school leader draws from a wide repertoire in their feedback with children, parents, support staff, teachers, middle and senior leaders, outside professionals, even inspectors. Providing honest and helpful feedback is, I think, their super skill.
Here are 10 things I’ve learnt about how school leaders feed back.
1. Your biggest weakness can become your biggest strength
I think one of the reasons that I now feel more comfortable providing feedback, is because I’ve had to work hard at a skill that did not come naturally. There were times earlier in my career when I could have been quicker to provide feedback. As a result of me being too slow, or not clear enough, staff were slow to change and pupils suffered. I decided that I didn’t want to keep looking back at missed opportunities, or regret a lack of courage.
If it’s not one of your strengths yet, then go and watch people who do it well, and get them to watch you while you deliver feedback. It’s what I did, and I think it’s the best way we grow. When a skill is hard-won, it can become your super skill. The truth is that good, objective, professional feedback as work is rare. There is great shortage of people skilled enough who are prepared to be both clear and kind. Companies spend thousands on management consultants to simply tell them the truth.
2. Remember the honest (but not difficult) conversation
Most leaders worry a lot about having difficult conversations, whereas we should probably spend more time thinking about the smaller, honest (but not difficult) conversations because there are so many more of them. Some feedback can’t wait and should be delivered straight away. These drive-by conversations are a way of dealing with something quickly and also creating in our minds a mental script which we can reach for when something just needs to happen. These are for the moments when we just need to be honest about something we’ve seen that isn’t right and doesn’t match our values.
The relative speed of these drive-by conversations helps us to kill overthinking. It’s one short interaction, then it’s over. The more of them we have, the easier we make it for other leaders to do the same. It’s the same psychological principle on British trains (‘See it, say it, sorted,’) which is meant to kill silent acquiescence, and move people from passive bystanders to active participants. You are, by addressing these moments, being more explicitly the leader, reinforcing norms and codes, and actively shaping culture. They are a proactive response to Lieutenant General David Morrison’s challenge, the standards you walk past are the standards you accept.
3. Widen the team (no single point of failure)
When only one person is seen as the person responsible for delivering feedback or holding people to account, this suggests an unhealthy and inefficient culture. The use of VAR in football and the third umpire and DRS in cricket is a helpful analogy. These sports are now less reliant on a single point of failure – the power and high stakes of a single decision maker has been shared across a team. No longer do we miss something simply because the referee or the umpire doesn’t see it. There are not only more eyes on the game, there are also more ways of assessing whether this was fair or not. When we develop a broader consensus of what constitutes effective, professional behaviours, this can change the culture to one where the team feels empowered to provide continuous feedback. Each middle and senior leader leading a team ultimately makes the on-the-ground decision when feedback (positive and corrective) is required.
4. Focus on the receiving not the giving
Many management books focus attention on how to give feedback, but what is actually more important is how to receive feedback. Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen – Thanks for the Feedback
Feedback is much less about the message we give, and much more about how that message is received. How can we better focus our attention on the receiver and not the giver? Into what soil is your message landing? A peaty loam enriched by plenty of daily interaction, and the regular irrigation of praise for good work done? Or is it thin, stony soil where little effort has been made to improve fertility, which means any potential learning is likely to bounce right off?
Where working closely with our team, we are responsible for the day-to-day management of this soil, so we know what feedback we are speaking into. But beyond our team, we tread carefully because the ‘receiving’ element of feedback is less clear. The vast majority of feedback we give will be in one-to-one conversations where there is a regular drip-feed of noticing and acknowledgement of work done well. Don’t underestimate this feedback praise as the bedrock on which professional relationships grow.
Emotional triggers often prevent people from receiving feedback well. One way to dispel this potential negativity is to model the way that we invite and receive feedback ourselves. Authentic leaders are good at requesting regular feedback on their own behaviour from trusted colleagues. They build personal mechanisms for making this happen, so it becomes more than just a vague wish, for example, asking: What support could I give that would be most helpful? What could I stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?
5. Frame your feedback
Before you observe your colleague, be clear what you will be looking at and what you won’t. It ensures there are no surprises. For example, frame the expectations of lesson visits, learning walks, drop ins. Be clear about your colleague’s expectations of what is going on (and who will hear about the feedback beyond you). Ask the following questions:
– What skill are you working on?
– What would you like me to focus on?
– What do you NOT want me to look at?
When you get this balance right, your colleague begins to believe that you did what we agreed. He/she feels psychologically safer about you visiting next time, in fact looks forward to it because they can steer your feedback to the areas they want to work on. Instead of being a passive recipient, they exert some autonomy in the feedback discussion.
Recognise the moment in the term. For example, if I visit a Early Career Teacher’s classroom who is making rapid progress with their practice and I only offer vague appreciation (‘that was a great Q&A’), while what the teacher is looking for is some developmental coaching, they are going to be disappointed. But if they are unwell, struggling with workload and it’s the last week of term, they’ll be less open to proper detailed feedback. It’s recognition and appreciation they probably need.
Before feeding back, go back to the agreed parameters. Decide which slice from the rich feedback cake in front of you is key. What will be most helpful? What is secondary and can wait? What will make the biggest difference to their practice?
6. Observe more, and use fewer words.
Be specific in your feedback of what they said and did:
When you did X, I could see pupils do Y.
Because you said A, pupils definitely did B.
It’s amazing when people hear this level of detail, how eye-opening it can be. Careful on the ground observation helps shrink the blind spots we all have, along with any potential defensiveness. Feedback helps to close some of our Johari windows, which at the beginning of our careers are often wide open. Feedback improves performance most when it relates to specific behaviours and when it is given promptly. Study people in their natural habitat and then describe exactly what you see. Be more David Attenborough.
Just as a good lesson plan helps the teacher to use fewer words and get pupils activated more, so knowing exactly what you will and will not say helps you get yourself out of the way of the message. What do I mean by this? Well, when I am about to deliver some feedback I’m usually nervous, worried about delivering the message, anxious about it will land. My nerves speed up my talk. And as a result, the receiver is neither afforded the time (generative pauses), nor the space (silence), to be able to both hear my message clearly, and to process what they think about what’s being said. This is one of the reasons that I write down exactly what I am going to say and then read it out, slowly. This communicates to the receiver that this was important enough to me to spend time thinking about them when they were not in the room, and those reflections remain in my journal.
If we’re worried we are too people-pleasing, try to acknowledge this as a feeling as an emotion which wants success for the receiver. Then focus more on the clarity of your message and allowing silence for the receiver to respond (in other words don’t soften the message). If we’re worried we may be too directive and lack empathy, try finding opportunities to hear the other’s perspective, and ask more questions about what concrete steps and practical future support could look like.
7. Little and often
Studies show that feedback can lead to higher performance and motivation. A meta-analysis by Kluger and DeNisi (1996) found that well-designed feedback interventions led to performance improvements in 70% of cases, while 30% actually led to a drop in performance. This suggests that feedback is strongly dependent on how it is given, who by, and the conditions within which it is received.
If poorly delivered feedback can cause a drop in performance in about a third of cases, what can we do to bring about greater consistency in the way that everybody is entitled to high quality, accurate feedback? Making it more frequent, and therefore less high stakes, will help. As Paul Bambrick-Santoyo says: the most successful leaders observe teachers frequently, then assign them just one or two action steps per week. It feels excruciatingly slow at first … but little by little, the steps build momentum.
In a session I was running this week, one leader said: I’m more comfortable giving difficult feedback to parents than I am to my own colleagues. Most of us in the room agreed. Why is this? I wondered. Perhaps because we have had years of practice in all sorts of parent feedback conversations about subject progress, behaviour, attendance, exam results, predictions, setting, options, open evenings – and formal slots devoted to doing this. Whereas we don’t really have formal mechanisms for giving feedback to colleagues. They have to be squeezed in at the end of the day. There’s no playbook for feeding back to teachers who are late with their assessments, or not marking books, or not fulfilling their role as a tutor.
NPQ courses use the phrase setting high expectations and holding to account. But in my experience we don’t really spell out what that means, and exactly what kind of things you have to do to make that happen. For example, before the event – how do you tell people exactly what you want to happen, for example, what do you expect to be marked, or what is the role of the tutor? And after the event – how will you feedback people who aren’t doing these things, and tell them that you need their behaviour to change? These are not straightforward conversations in teams where you rub your shoulders with and eat sandwiches together and maybe share lifts to work, and in small schools it can be really challenging.
One way that feedback is likely to land more successfully is when we rehearse the precise words we intend to deliver. Many leaders I’ve worked with over the last few years have asked for this kind of leadership deliberate practice, and it can really build confidence when it comes to the actual moment for the conversation. Role playing possible responses from the receiver can make you more clear in the moment.
We are likely to have more impact when we move people from simply accepting the feedback, to actually using the feedback (Lemov, Woolway & Yezzi – Practice Perfect). With teaching feedback on a regular cycle this should be simple. With one-to-ones, you may need to think about your questions more carefully: How did you find using the feedback? What worked and what was hard? Get people to practice the feedback as quickly as possible (shorten the feedback loop).
8. Take calculated risks
Feeding back to parents comes in all shapes and sizes. When a complaint comes in, it makes me want to close down, because effectively the parents have turned against me. But I also know that often they are crying out for help in the only way they know. Once I am sure that we are belt and braces intact with our complaints processes and compliance, I then have the choice to move beyond my resentment and be the adult in this conversation.
In my previous role I would step in and offer a ‘next steps’ separate to any formal process, if you like a without prejudice conversation. This provided an opportunity for an honest, more in-depth conversation and so that we can listen to parents and hear from their experience. Not only can this helpful feedback be communicated back to the school, but it can also provide learning in terms of training for staff and leaders (identifying what the school could have done differently, dos and don’ts etc). We have used some of the feedback from previous complaints processes (with parent permission) at SENDCO conferences and in training for HTs. Some of this is about the lived experience of parenting a high-needs child. Secondly, I would us this opportunity to try to avoid any future action that the parent/s may plan to take (taking the complaint externally, escalating to tribunal). The conversation was the opportunity to ask parents: what are you really hoping to achieve here?
School leaders are in a position of privilege, at the chalk face where there is at least some communication, when there are so many other institutions that have lost that relationship. So if we don’t take it, who will? The response I sometimes hear is that there’s no point in doing this, it’s hopeless. But it’s never hopeless. Every conversation with every family is always a chance to bring positive change.
9. Consistency in key
Without a structured checklist for feeding back, the experience for staff may be susceptible to one of these two extremes: (a) I received feedback about my teaching which was overgenerous and so general that it gave me no specifics about what to improve, or (b) feedback was harsh, and there was too much of it. There were few strengths described, plenty of ebi’s, but no real plan for how I could put things right.
The key is to make any checklist precise enough to be useful across a range of audiences, and simple enough to be replicable across the team. When instructional coaching is a fundamental part of the professional development of teachers (for example, through Steplab), then using trained coaches for feeding back, instead of relying on senior leaders who may operate in different ways, can create well-framed, consistent experiences for receivers.
The coach then supports that teacher to make that change. Here support equals questioning, modelling, implementation planning and rehearsal. If any of these mechanisms, particularly modelling and rehearsal – are absent from coaching, it’s unlikely to have the desired effect. Responsive Coaching – Josh Goodrich
Notice here that feedback is just one part in our instructional coaching armoury. Just make sure that the use of this kind of consistent scripts and guides don’t make the feeding back clunky and inauthentic. Don’t lose the human touch.
10. It’s about the future not the past
Just as children smell fear in a nervous supply teacher, staff on the receiving end of your feedback know whether you really care about their success or not. When you really care about their improvement, it shows. It shows in the way you listen, it shows when you drop in and catching them doing good things, it shows in the checking-in moments. They begin to get a sense that, working with you, it will be hard to fail. With you tilling the soil, they are growing in a safe environment.
Feedback should be, counterintuitively, all about the future, and not a criticism of the past. While all of the information evidence and reflections are taken from the past, the purpose of sharing this is so that we can both help shape the future together. ‘Feedforward’ means feedback aimed at future improvement rather than backward-looking criticism. When you are selecting what to say, the key question to ask is: will this help me to invest in building this person up? It is poor feedback which looks back on a past we can’t change, instead of forward towards a future that we can.
The truth is that while feedback is hard, it’s necessary for us all to grow. Many school leaders are known for this ability even if it makes them personally uncomfortable for a while. They put standards in the school above personal feelings. And the deep truth is that colleagues sense that when leaders observe carefully, catch things early, and talk about the problem quickly, it’s clear that we want them to improve. We know we’ve created a healthy feedback culture in our organisation when our desire for each colleague to hear helpful feedback becomes stronger than that our reluctance to have the conversation.
