Providing your staff with high-quality feedback is essential if you’re to meet the needs of pupils and parents, achieve good Ofsted results and drive school improvement. The right kind of feedback can help make teachers more effective, improve best practice and ultimately improve learning.
According to research carried out by Helen Timperley at the University of Auckland, the way teachers develop is similar to how students learn, and can have a significant impact on how well students perform.
Teachers are most likely to respond positively to feedback that’s clear, specific and focused on improving student outcomes, but which also includes challenging goals.
Your feedback should further encourage teachers to be independent learners and ideally be delivered in an environment that teachers find trusting and supportive. If your feedback policies are in need of improving, it’s worth considering the following four areas:
Quality over quantity
Ask what has gone well, be positive and link back to learning goals. Ask teachers what they can improve, but be realistic in the goals you set. Be constructive and practical – always prompt teachers to consider the way forward.
Beware of the pitfalls
Be careful when using different forms of teacher assessment, be they lesson observations, student ratings or senior leadership inspections, or based on analysis of lesson plans and assignments.
These methods all have their uses, but can give rise to problems too. They will only prove to be useful tools if carried out according to an agreed protocol, in full knowledge of what inferences they can and cannot support. Also be aware that they can be subject to bias and inaccuracies.
Use a variety of methods
If you want to effectively assess a teacher, you should obtain evidence via a range of different methods and evaluate them against each other. The volume of data this will produce might seem daunting, but it will help negate the aforementioned pitfalls that can arise when certain feedback methods are used in isolation.
Devise a school support system
When analysing different assessment methods, it’s important to take into account ‘political’ factors such as trust, authority, power, who controls the information obtained and what impact these are likely to have on your assessments. A robust internal school support system will help teachers respond positively to the challenge of improvement.
In essence, feedback and evaluation is an important leadership task. It contributes to school improvement by providing an accurate assessment of how well both the school and individual teachers are performing. It leads to the identification of improvement priorities and to evidence-based school improvement planning, which results in clear benefits for pupils.
