Feedback Culture
Roussin, J. and Zimmerman, D. (2014) ‘Inspire Learning, Create a feedback culture that leads to improved practice not dread’, JSD Learning Forward, 35(6), pp. 36–47.
Policy is focussed on test scores, observations of classroom practices, rubric-based assessments, student feedback, evaluation and student work to ensure accountability for school reform.
This has a place in professional development but distracts from the most important variable of all: the teacher's mindset about continued growth and learning. How professionals receive and apply feedback is the cornerstone in any system for improving teacher performance.
Teacher feedback is often given after observations but this leaves out the teacher's cognitive capital i.e. the thoughts and reflections before, during and after practice.
When leaders foster a school culture that supports emotional resourcefulness and transparency, cognitive capital increases, thus feedback is applied more successfully to improve practice.
The concept of incremental improvement through feedback - one teacher at a time, one classroom at a time - needs reevaluating. A culture in which teachers learn to receive and apply feedback in order to build collective wisdom needs to be promoted.
How each person responds to feedback reveals much about the degree of trust and the value placed on continuous improvement and learning within a school culture. #
Positive feedback culture stems from an environment that promotes a growth-mindset, encourages innovation, creativity, experimentation and learning from failure.
Thoughtful leaders should consider the person on the other end when delivering feedback. They should think about how to advise, what to focus on and what to ignore. They should consider: How will this person receive my feedback? Will this person listen and use my suggestions constructively? How will I know if the feedback was received, accepted and applied to improve practices?
'Thin slices' of feedback - i.e. feedback that only focuses on one particular part of the lesson - are an obstacle to receiving feedback. This type of feedback can be perceived as devaluing the complexity of teaching and learning.
Feedback is a dialogue that allows time for the receiver to reflect, interpret, make meaning from and adapt the feedback.
To further shape a school culture leaders must work with the school community to clearly define shared goals for observation and feedback that focus on mastery and a deeper understanding of the craft of teaching, not one-time performances. By allowing opportunities for teachers to insert personal learning goals and reflections, these types of conversations shift from episodic to planned, purposeful, and ongoing, creating a job-embedded, collaborative model.
Imbalance of power is an obstacle to giving feedback as it can cause the teacher to feel a sense of disempowerment and a threat to his or her professional image.
In most schools, the principal controls how the evaluation process unfolds which leaves teachers feeling powerless. This feeling leads to emotional, rather than cognitive, responses to feedback which show up as defensiveness, helplessness or stone-walling, thus the feedback will be discounted.
Leaders should strive for agreement within the school on the purpose of feedback. By adopting protocols or procedures, the community names the shared agreements. When all parties commit to the collaborative conversation, ownership for receiving feedback, making meaning of it, and applying it to instruction increases.
Stone, D. & Heen, S. (2014). Thanks for the feedback. The science and art of receiving feedback well. New York, NY: Viking.
"How we receive feedback is actually more important than how we give feedback. If your goal is to empty the sink by sending the water down the drain, which is more important: How you run the faucet or whether the drain is open? You can be the most skilful feedback giver on the planet, but at the end of the day, the receiver is in charge of what they let in, and how and whether they choose to change.”
Leaders should regularly seek feedback about the level of trust in the organisation as cultures that lack trust are more likely to perceive feedback as negative or to react with protective responses.
Feeney, E.J. (2007) ‘Quality feedback: The essential ingredient for teacher success’, The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas, 80(4), pp. 191–197.
Quality feedback is essential. The absence of quality feedback means a teacher's independent creation of meaningful goals for his or her own professional growth probably will not happen. Teachers begin to lack internal motivation.
How can we ensure quality feedback is being given across the school when attempting to create a culture of feedback?
Quality feedback is based on a performance rubric that clearly defines the characteristics of effective teaching. The rubric should be communicated to teachers prior to engaging in the evaluation process. Feedback should be descriptive and based on what the teacher and students actually do, supported by evidence of student outcomes throughout the lesson. However, this is a large time commitment and is difficult to achieve in the time limitations of teacher workload.
Quality feedback requires a structure to promote reflective enquiry. Reflection tools help facilitate collaborative, reflective dialogue after a lesson observation. Teachers must play an active role in analysing the data and collaborating with the person giving feedback.
Try asking questions that prompt the teacher to personally reflect on the lesson and thus internalise and apply the feedback.
Quality feedback focuses on student outcomes not teacher processes. This gives the teacher greater motivation to apply the feedback.
London, M. and Smither, J.W. (2002) 'Feedback orientation, feedback culture, and the longitudinal performance management process', Human resource management review 12:81-100.
Feedback culture (an organisational-level construct) – individuals are shaped by the organisation’s feedback culture over time.
As the feedback culture becomes stronger, people seek out feedback more. Over time, feedback orientation and feedback culture are mutually reinforcing, each strengthening the other.
Dewett, T. Delivering Employee Feedback (2014). Carpentaria, CA: Lynda.com.
Building a high performance culture begins by building a culture that embraces feedback.
In a positive feedback culture, feedback serves as accountability. People in lower performing cultures fear receiving feedback, but people in high performing cultures fear not receiving feedback. #
Effective feedback reduces friction surrounding critical discussion. Frank exchanges become a positive and expected norm.
Hattie, J. and Timperley, H. (2007) ‘The power of feedback’, Review of Educational Research, 77(1), pp. 81–112.
Effective feedback must answer three major questions asked by a teacher: Where am I going? (What are the goals?), How am I going? (What progress is being made toward the goal?), and Where to next? (What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?).
An individual's overall receptivity to feedback is characterised by: 1) liking feedback, 2)behavioural propensity to seek feedback, 3) cognitive propensity to process feedback mindfully and deeply, 4) sensitivity to others' views of oneself, 5) a belief in the value of feedback, and 6) feeling accountable to act on the feedback. #
People with a performance orientation often compare their performance to that of others and tend to focus on doing better than others.
People with a mastery orientation are more likely to be receptive to, and make constructive use of, feedback and thus persist until they attain competence.
The desire for certainty about where one stands in the eyes of others may affect how feedback is received initially. The need to protect one's ego may influence whether feedback is processed mindfully. Trying to manage others' impressions may influence whether and how one changes one's behaviour.
A strong feedback culture is one where individuals continuously receive, solicit, and use formal and informal feedback to improve their job performance.
The individual's feedback orientation depends in part on the support and climate for learning. The more frequent the feedback and the closer it follows the behaviour in question, the more likely it is to be accepted.
The more support for learning and development, including the availability of behaviourally-oriented feedback, the more the individual is likely to develop a positive orientation toward feedback.
How to enhance the quality of feedback in an organisation.
Organisations should provide a) training for supervisors and others about how to provide useful feedback, b) clear standards concerning valued behaviours that are relevant to organisational goals, c) clear performance measurements, d) reports tying individual performance to bottom-line departmental or organisational indexes and, e) time to review and clarify feedback results with others, such as one's supervisor.
Top-level managers should serve a s role models about how to seek, receive and use feedback. The organisation should ensure that everyone receives feedback (i.e. it's not voluntary) and uses feedback to guide development.
How can you create a culture of feedback that is not forced but inherent? Should it be involuntary at first? Does feedback being compulsory create negative mindsets around it?
Organisation should ensure that performance improvements following feedback are recognised and rewarded.
Organisations should instil practices that provide support for using feedback such as skilled facilitators to help recipients interpret formal feedback, set goals and track progress. Feedback recipients should be encouraged to discuss their feedback and reach a shared agreement.
Feedback recipients need freedom to decide how they will act on the feedback (giving them a sense of self-control) and opportunities to learn.
Feedback needs to become an essential part of the way work is accomplish. As a positive feedback culture becomes stronger, individuals seek and receive feedback more often, deal with it mindfully, and use it to calibrate and adjust their behaviour to improve performance.
Coaching
Availability of effective coaching is likely to be a hallmark of organisations with a strong feedback culture.
Coaches can be a supervisor, mentor, an external coach, a peer or even a subordinate.
Coaching is more than just feedback. It is about building a relationship between colleagues and creating a dialogue surrounding: information about expectations, demonstrations, opportunities to practice new behaviours and receive feedbak, and praise for successes along the way to performance improvement.
Individuals who are high in feedback orientation are more responsive to coaching.
Coaching encourages feedback orientation.
Feedback should be viewed as a long term initiative. What are the effects of feedback over time?
Positive reactions to feedback and changes in behaviour resulting from feedback may occur slowly and incrementally over time.
Feedback may occur in various aspects of one's life simultaneously. Some people may not be able to deal with, accept, and respond to different sources of feedback at the same time.
Self-knowledge and self-concept change as the individual gains self-confidence with improving feedback results over time.
Individuals will process feedback more deeply, find more personal meaning in the feedback, and make internal attributions that lead to goal setting when they are high in feedback orientation and the organisation has a strong feedback culture.
Feedback is attended to less when the individual faces other, especially conflicting, feedback and demands inside or outside work.
Kahmann, K. and Mulder, R.H. (2006) ‘The impact of feedback culture on individual use of feedback’, UFHRD, 30(1), pp. 1–10.
Feedback in organisations has to be studied from a continuous and longitudinal perspective. Contextual and individual aspects of feedback processes have to be integrated. Therefore we need a concept of feedback culture.
Employees’ experiences within an organisation’s feedback culture influences a) employees’ attitude towards feedback and their use of feedback, b) their subjective norms towards the use of feedback and c) their perceived control on their use of feedback. These components are of influence on the actual use of feedback.
The affective component of attitude is closely connected to the cognitive component and relates to emotional aspects aligned with feedback. Employees can feel comfortable, or
uncomfortable, about giving and receiving feedback. A person who believes in the value of feedback is supposed to feel comfortable about giving and receiving feedback. # #
Some employees may believe that they can improve, develop or learn of feedback, while others may perceive the situation as being somewhat hopeless. Therefore employees’ beliefs that they can develop or learn from feedback could predict their actual behaviour to use feedback.
Makes strong links between feedback culture and continued professional development.