Feedback & Failing Forward #AuthenticEDU

        As I finish, Personal and Authentic by Thomas C. Murray, I always begin to reflect on how this will enhance my own philosophy of teaching, learning, and educational leadership. I want to share two stories of feedback I have received that have stuck with me, both stories are deeply personal. The first occurred during my first few months as an assistant principal at my school. To provide some context for those of you reading this that don't know me, I taught in my school for eleven years and was an instructional leader prior to going over to the dark side of administration. I started as a brand new teacher, fresh out of graduate school, which was pretty unheard of when I was hired in my school with a few rare exceptions and my move to administration was not one that I can say I particularly knew I would be making from the start of my career. I am both the youngest and sole female administrator in our high school. A few things to know about me is that I love to learn, thrive on challenges (I was a figure skater growing up-- so much of this comes from falling down and getting back up again), and will always find ways to fail forward when given meaningful feedback and even from feedback I don't particularly care to hear. 

    The setting of the first story was in the associate principals office where we had weekly meetings during my first year in my assistant principal role, with one of the assistant superintendents who was known for not liking the high school environment and in particular the person who had vacated my role before me. This particular morning, when the other assistant principal colleague left the room she asked that they close the door and proceeded to tell me that in our Friday morning meeting the superintendent had noticed that I was on my cell phone and was not paying attention and that he was very offended by this. She shared that she had begged him to give her the opportunity to speak with me about this rather than having the embarrassment of having the superintendent speak to me about it. She shared this in front of the associate principal, who is known by the entire staff to be on his phone non-stop in every meeting he is in but the comments were very pointedly directed at me. I apologized for this and vowed to do better. She asked what I had been doing and if there was a reason, I offered the explanation that I often take notes on my phone so that I remember to follow-up on things when they are asked in these meetings and that my mother had also been having some challenges so she had been messaging me but assured her that I would find another means to keep my notes and would be out of touch with my family during these Friday meetings. She has long since retired but this conversation stuck with me and many that followed as I processed through this afterwards with the associate principal. My fail forward was that I wanted to be the best assistant principal I could be and that if keeping notes in Google Keep was going to upset that, I would find another tool to manage this and my mom would just have to wait. I was absolutely mortified by this interaction and puzzled too. Since this time, I go to these Friday morning meetings and turn my phone over at every one of them so that I can not see any messages and have told my administrative assistant that if there is an emergency, she will need to send someone to get me because I will not look at my phone. It puzzles me to this day however, when I watch many other administrators pick up their phones and respond to messages, e-mails, etc. throughout our Friday meetings. I, however, do not and I never will.  

      The setting of the second story was in the superintendents office during a Friday meeting with several of my colleagues during a protocol we were following on evaluating feedback on teacher evaluations, more recently. We had been asked to watch video's and then write-up feedback to these video's which we were critiquing together.  We reviewed the feedback the associate principal from my school provided first and he is masterful at writing effective feedback for teachers by drawing on their strengths and then finding and using research to continue to drive their practices forward, typically in the area of formative assessment and student engagement. I was not very excited when my feedback came up next, as I always hate to follow him since he is just masterful at instructional leadership but I was excited to get some feedback on my feedback since this is not something we generally do and we had decided as a district leadership team to focus on this practice this year after a shared book study. While I received much of the same warm feedback that I have received in the past from the assistant superintendent who was my mentor my first two years as an administrator, my superintendent pointed to how I don't always provide the context for the area's of growth to teachers. Meaning that in my feedback, I don't always provide exactly what I saw that moved me to comment on the need for growth in my write-ups. He pointed this out in such a non-threatening way and couched it in providing an explanation of another evaluation he had read where he could see the importance of the area of growth but as the teacher reading it, he was not sure that without sitting with me and discussing it that they would be clear on exactly what I saw that led to my commenting on that particular area of growth. As I reflected on this later that day, I went back and looked at some recent evaluations, I noticed in some informal evaluations I had done this, in particular when a teacher and I had agreed on a particular focus area. I wrote to both the superintendent and the assistant superintendent and thanked them for going through this exercise and the valuable feedback that I would integrate into my practice moving forward. As I have written evaluations since then, I have played acute attention to providing information about what I saw that led to my recommendations to provide more meaningful feedback to teachers. I may be the only administrator that was disappointed when teacher evaluations ended this year because of COVID as I was excited to get better at providing feedback to teachers I was working with!

    

    After reading this book, I share these two stories because they both have deeply shaped me as a leader and educator. In the book, the point is made that we never know what baggage our students come to us with and today this strikes me more than ever, we all have baggage. Mine is what I call #firstworldproblems. Many of the students and staff that I work with, theirs are too but it does not mean that is not relevant to them. As we are beginning to think about returning to school, or what our new normal might be like, I think we all have more questions than answers. We all are anxiety ridden about returning to school. We are forming committees at present, we have students working on a transdisciplinary project around what the new normal is, I have questions about where these two intersect? Our students and staff will come back to us different than they left on March 11, that much I am sure of. Our stories of what we lived through during this time, will be with us forever as will feedback that teachers provide students and leaders provide teachers or central office administrators provide to building administrators but will we use it to fail forward? Will we put our students on these committees to help us design the schools of the future? If you think about it, we have 1300+ students in our high school and 150ish adults. Why are the adults the only ones making decisions about what this new normal should look like? What better way to provide our students with a personalized and authentic learning experience than this... the future is after all in their hands. I hope as a high school, we begin to look beyond the core area's and build truly authentic curriculum, pedagogy and assessment for our students where they receive meaningful feedback and continue to fail forward on their journey to becoming who they are meant to be. 

Stay well. Thank you @ThomasMurray for an excellent & inspiring book.