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Overview

Research shows that teacher performance feedback is critical for teachers’ professional development, and that quality of instruction is the leading factor in student achievement. Improvements to teacher performance feedback can have significant effects on student outcomes.

There are techniques you can use to make your performance feedback more effective and more consistent, and TNTP has consolidated them into a procedure called the Five-Step Teacher Feedback Framework. The five steps are:

1. Prepare – Decide what to focus on in the meeting.
2. Set the Tone – Establish a positive, collaborative tone.
3. Identify Development Area(s) – Together, identify areas for development.
4. Plan and Practice Concrete Action – Together, plan action steps and practice them.
5. Set a Timeline – Decide on a timeline for improvement.

There are a few different goals of the evaluation and feedback process. The most straightforward goal is to improve specific areas of teachers’ practice. Beyond that, however, a larger goal is to increase teachers’ levels of self-awareness, so they can think about and improve their own practice.

In order to empower teachers to take an active hand in their own professional development, Steps 3 and 4 use a technique called Levels of Questioning, which uses scaffolded questions to help teachers realize issues and find solutions on their own. (See Step 3 for a detailed explanation of this technique).