CEPR Project Director Miriam Greenberg discusses the importance of providing quality teacher feedback in the following Education Week Commentary.
You've heard it before: "Your call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance." If you thought this message was just a stall tactic before reaching an actual person, let me assure you, the calls are taped.
For a short time, I worked as a telemarketer, selling reading supplies to dupable literates. At my call center, managers "listened in" to assess the impact of the sales conversation, to identify missed opportunities for upselling pen and ink refills, and to coach us on better advising customers to purchase lap desks they never knew they needed in the first place. Though I dubbed my supervisor "director of wiretapping," my sales doubled after I implemented her feedback. Mousepads and folios flew off warehouse shelves. Never in my career, before or since, have I received more feedback on my own advice-giving than I did after those late nights by the phone.
These days, we give a lot of lip service to increasing the amount of feedback given to teachers. Research indicates that these efforts are worthwhile. Teachers' improvement can be predicted by the extent of their interactions with those more expert in teaching and by the extent to which they seek instructional advice from their colleagues. Further, in order for classroom observations to be meaningful to teachers, they must be accompanied by high-quality feedback.
...