A Method for Getting and Giving Feedback

Step 1: Identify Another Teacher (or Two) with Whom You Would Like to Work

Naturally it will help if this person teaches the same grade as you do. More important, however, is that you trust each other, and that your partner is as committed to the project as you are.

Step 2: Tape Yourself and Watch the Tapes Alone

There is a lot of value in videotaping your teaching. As I mentioned earlier, it's difficult to watch your class while you're busy teaching it, but you can watch a video at your leisure, and you can replay important parts. If you don't own a video camera, you may be able to borrow one from your school. You might want to send a note home with students to let parents know that their child is being videotaped, that the tapes are purely for your professional development and will not be used for any other purpose, and that the tapes will be erased at the end of the school year. (You should check with your principal on this matter.)

Simply set the camera on a tripod in a place where you think it will capture most of the class, and switch it on at the start of a lesson. The first few tapes you make will probably give you important information about logistical matters. You might not be able to tape every type of lesson. For example, you only have one camera, so you'll be able to see only part of the classroom. Also, picking up audio is frequently difficult, so noisy participatory lessons may not work well.

I suggest that you first tape a lesson that you feel typically goes pretty well. It's not easy to watch yourself (and later to critique yourself), so stack the deck in your favor at first. There will be time enough later to examine the things you suspect you don't do so well.

You can expect it to take a class or two for your students to become accustomed to the idea of being videotaped, although this is generally not a concern for long. Then too, it will probably take a couple of tapes for you to become accustomed to hearing your voice and seeing yourself move on tape.

Once you have these practical matters settled, you can focus on content. Watch these tapes with a notepad in hand. Don't begin by judging your performance. Consider first what surprises you about the class. What do you notice about your students that you didn't already know? What do you notice about yourself? Spend time observing. Don' t start by critiquing (Figure 8).

Step 3: With Your Partner, Watch Tapes of Other Teachers

Once you have grown accustomed to watching videotapes of yourself, it's time to include your partner. But don't watch tapes of each other yet. Observe tapes of other teachers. You can find taped classrooms in several places on the Internet, for example, http://www.videoclassroom.org and http://www.learner.org

The reason to watch tapes of other teachers first is to gain practice in constructive observation and commenting, and to get this practice in a non-threatening situation. Further, you will also get a sense of whether you and your partner are compatible for this work.

What are you looking for on these tapes? It's not productive just to sit down and watch them like a movie, waiting to see what will happen. You should have a concrete goal, such as observing classroom management or observing the emotional atmosphere of the classroom. Many of the tapes featured on Web sites are there for a particular reason, so it will usually be clear why the person who posted the tape thought it was interesting.

This is your chance to practice observing and commenting on a classroom. Imagine what you would say to the teacher you observe. Indeed, imagine that the teacher is there in the room with you. In general, comments should have the following two properties:

1. They should be supportive. Being supportive doesn't mean you are there only to say positive things. It does mean that even when you are saying something negative, you are supporting the teacher you are observing. The point of this exercise is not to "spot the flaw." The positive comments should outnumber the negative ones. I know that principle seems corny, because when listening to positive comments a teacher can't help but think, "He is saying that only because he knows he is supposed to say something positive." Even so, positive comments remind the teacher that she is doing a lot of things right, and those things should be acknowledged and reinforced.
2. They should be concrete and about the behaviors you observe, not about qualities you infer. Thus, don't just say, "She really knows how to explain things"; instead say, "That third example really made the concept click for students." Rather than saying, "His classroom management is a mess," say, "I noticed that a lot of the students were having trouble listening when he asked them to sit down."

Step 4: With Your Partner, Watch and Comment on Each Other's Tapes

You should not undertake this step until you feel quite comfortable watching tapes of other teachers with your partner. This means you should feel comfortable in what you say and you should feel that your partner knows how to be supportive; that is, you should feel that you wouldn't mind if your partner's comments were directed to you instead of to the unknown teacher on the tape. The ground rules for commenting on the tapes of other teachers apply here as well: be supportive, be concrete, and focus on behaviors. Because this process is now interactive, there are a few additional things to think about (Figure 9).

The teacher whose tape is being viewed should set the goal for the session. She should describe what she would like the other teacher to watch for in the session. It is vital that the viewer respect this request, even if she sees something else on the tape that she thinks is important. If you present a tape hoping to get some ideas about engaging students in a lesson on fractions and your partner says, "Gee, I notice some real classroom-management issues here," you're going to feel ambushed, and you're not going to be motivated to continue the process.

What if your partner keeps wanting to work on trivial things and you notice that there are bigger problems that she's ignoring? If you and your partner make a habit of taping yourselves, there will likely be a time when this issue will come up naturally in the course of discussing something else. You and your partner also might consider agreeing that after viewing, say, ten tapes, each of you will suggest to the other something they might work on that hasn't come up yet

A final point. The purpose of watching your partner teach is to help her reflect on her practice, to think about her teaching. You do that by describing what you see. Don't suggest what the teacher should do differently unless you are asked. You don't want to come off as thinking you have all the answers. If your partner wants your ideas about how to address an issue, she'll ask you, in which case you should of course offer any ideas you have. But until you're asked, remain in the mode of a careful, supportive observer, and don't slip into the role of the expert fixer, regardless of how confident you are that you have a good solution.

Step 5: Bring It Back to the Classroom and Follow Up

The purpose of videotaping yourself is to increase your awareness of what is happening in your classroom, and to gain a new perspective on what you are actually doing and why, and on what your students are doing and why. With that awareness will almost certainly come some resolve to make some changes. The way to do that is as follows: Make a plan that during a specific lesson you will do one thing that addresses the issue with which you are concerned. Even if you think of three things you want to do, do just one. Keep it simple. You'll have plenty of chances to add the other two things. And of course tape the lesson so you can see what happened.

The program I have sketched here is rooted in the cognitive principles I have described. For example, I emphasized in Chapter One that the most important limitation to thinking is the capacity of working memory. That' s why I recommend videotaping—because it's difficult to think deeply about your teaching while you're actually teaching. Also, because memory is based on what we think about (Chapter Three), we can't expect to remember later a complete version of what happened in a class; we remember only what we paid attention to in class. In Chapter Six I said that experts see the world differently than novices do—they see deep structure, not surface structure—and the key reason they can see this way is that they have broad and deep experience in their field. Careful observation of a variety of classrooms will help you better recognize classroom dynamics, and careful observation of your own classroom will help you recognize the dynamics that are typical of your own teaching.

I emphasized the importance of background knowledge to effective problem solving. Background knowledge means not just subject matter knowledge; for a teacher it also means knowledge of students and how they interact with you, with each other, and with the material you teach. Careful observation, especially in partnership with another, well-informed teacher is a good method for gaining that background knowledge. Finally, Chapter Eight painted a hopeful picture of human intelligence—that it can be changed through sustained hard work. There is every reason to believe this is true of teaching.