Ask a room of teachers whether they want more feedback and nearly every hand goes up. Then ask them to describe the last piece of feedback that changed what they did the following week, and the room goes quiet for a while. Eventually someone remembers a mentor from their second year. Someone else remembers one sentence a colleague said in a hallway, years ago, that they still think about. Both answers are true at the same time, and the distance between them is what this piece is about.
Wanting feedback and getting it
In 2009, TNTP published a study of teacher evaluation called The Widget Effect. The researchers looked at twelve school systems across four states and surveyed roughly 15,000 teachers. In the systems that used only two ratings, more than 99 percent of teachers were rated satisfactory. And 73 percent of the teachers surveyed said their most recent evaluation did not identify a single area to develop.[1]
That study is seventeen years old, and plenty of states rebuilt their evaluation systems in the years after it. It also measured evaluation, which is a different job from coaching, as we laid out in Coaching vs. Evaluation. Still, it describes the history a lot of experienced teachers carry: years of formal feedback that named nothing to work on.
So when a teacher says they want more feedback, they are often describing something that has been missing for a long time. What they usually mean is simple. Someone noticed something specific in their room and said so.
Some feedback makes things worse
The most useful study on this was not about teachers at all.
In 1996, Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi pooled more than six hundred measured effects of feedback on performance, drawn from over 23,000 observations, across many kinds of work and learning. On average, feedback helped. More than a third of the feedback attempts they found made performance worse.[2]
Their explanation is the part to keep. Feedback helped less the further it pulled a person's attention away from the task and toward themselves.
Here is what that looks like after an observation. "You're a natural with this group" points at the teacher. So does "that lesson didn't land." One is kind and one is hard, and they share a problem. Both leave the teacher thinking about who they are, and neither says anything about what happened on the carpet at 10:15.
Now try this one. "When you moved to the back of the room, the side conversations at the front table stopped within a minute." That sentence points at the room, and a teacher can do something with it tomorrow morning.
That review pooled very different tasks and settings, and the pattern will not tell you which comment in your building lands and which one stings. As a working rule for anyone giving feedback to an adult who cares about their work, it holds up well. Keep the sentence about the task.
Three kinds of feedback, arriving at once
Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, who teach at Harvard Law School, sort feedback into three kinds in their book Thanks for the Feedback.[3] Appreciation says I see you, and your work matters. Coaching says here is a way to get better. Evaluation says here is where you stand.
All three are real needs. A teacher who only ever hears suggestions eventually stops listening to them. A school with no evaluation has no way to hold a floor under quality.
The trouble starts when they show up in the same conversation. One teacher asks for coaching and gets appreciation: "Great lesson, keep it up." It is kind, and there is nothing in it to use. Another teacher, at the end of a brutal week, needed someone to notice the effort and got three suggestions instead.
And when any hint of evaluation is in the room, it drowns out the other two. People listen for the verdict first. The coaching arrives, and all anyone remembers is the grade.
Three questions worth answering
In 2007, John Hattie and Helen Timperley reviewed the research on feedback in schools and reduced useful feedback to three questions. Where am I going? How am I going? Where to next?[4]
Their review was about students, so carry it over to adults with some care. The three questions still fit a coaching conversation almost exactly. What are we working toward. What happened, measured against that. What is the next small step.
Most of the feedback teachers get answers only the middle question, and answers it with an adjective. "It went well." "It felt a little flat." Nothing names a goal before it and nothing names a step after it, so it has evaporated by Thursday. The same review found that praise aimed at the person carries so little information about the task that its effect is close to nothing.
A coaching cycle is those three questions put on a calendar. We walked through one week by week in What a Coaching Cycle Actually Looks Like.
Feedback helps less the further it pulls someone's attention away from the task and toward themselves. Keep the sentence about the task.
If you are the one giving it
Four changes a coach can make in the very next conversation.
Ask which kind they want before you give any. "Do you want to hear what I noticed, or talk about what to try next?" It takes five seconds. It tells the teacher which conversation they are in, and it gives them some say in a moment that usually offers none.
Point at the room. Before you speak, check whether your sentence is about something a student did or something the teacher is. If it is the second one, find the observation underneath it and say that instead.
Keep the verdict out. If you also hold an evaluative role, say out loud which one this is. A teacher who is listening for a grade cannot hear anything else.
End on where to next, and keep it small. One step, chosen with the teacher, and a date to talk about how it went. Feedback with no next step is a description of the past.
If you are the teacher on the other end, you can ask for the kind you want. "Can you tell me what you saw during the transition to centers?" gives whoever is watching a real job, and it is the quickest way to get the feedback you came for. There is more on building that habit on your own in Reflection Is the Most Underrated Teaching Skill.
Where eduimpact fits
eduimpact is built on the description side of all this. It reflects back what happened in a lesson in plain language, with no rating attached, and it follows up later on whether the next step happened. Before anything reaches a teacher, a person has reviewed it. There are no scores and no rankings anywhere in it.
Deciding what matters, and choosing the words for a hard conversation, stays with the coach. What the coach gets is a clear record to start from, organized into a few places worth looking, so the next conversation opens on what happened in the room. That is where good feedback starts, and it is what we want every coach to have more of.
Weisberg, D., Sexton, S., Mulhern, J., & Keeling, D. (2009). The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness. TNTP. https://tntp.org/publication/the-widget-effect-failure-to-act-on-differences-in-teacher-effectiveness/ ↩︎
Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The Effects of Feedback Interventions on Performance: A Historical Review, a Meta-Analysis, and a Preliminary Feedback Intervention Theory. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254-284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.119.2.254 ↩︎
Stone, D., & Heen, S. (2014). Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well. New York: Viking. ↩︎
Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The Power of Feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81-112. https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487 ↩︎