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Tasks, Responsibilities, and Materials

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Tasks, Responsibilities and Materials

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

# data[].attributes.body
Tasks, Responsibilities, and Materials

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

# data[].attributes.body
Tasks, Responsibilities, and Materials

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

# data[].attributes.body
Tasks, Responsibilities, and Material

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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10 Powerful Questions to Enroll a Client

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10 Powerful Questions to Enroll a Client

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Use this during all coaching conversations to gather data.

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Use this to plan for your coaching cycle kick off meeting

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At the beginning of every meeting, a question hangs in the air: Who will be heard? The answer has huge implications not only for decision making, but for the levels of diversity and inclusion throughout the organization. Being heard is a matter of whose ideas get included - and who, therefore, reaps the accompanying career benefits - and whose ideas get left behind.

Yet instead of relying on subject matter experts, people often pay closest attention to the person who talks most frequently, or has the most impressive title, or comes from the CEO's hometown. And that's because of how our brains are built.

The group decision-making process, rather than aligning with actual competence, habitually falls for messy proxies of expertise, a phrase coined by University of Utah management professor Bryan Bonner. Essentially, when our brains are left to their own devices, attention is drawn to shortcuts, such as turning focus to the loudest or tallest person in the room. Over time, letting false expertise run the show can have negative side effects.

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"The expert isn't heard, and then the expert leaves," Bonner said in an interview with the NeuroLeadership Institute, where I head the diversity and inclusion practice. "They want to realize their potential. [If] people can't shine when they should be shining, there's a huge human cost."

If the people who offer the most valuable contributions to your organization aren't appropriately recognized for it, they won't stay long. Or, possibly worse, they will stay and stop trying. As my mother was fond of reminding me when I got my first management role: "When people can't contribute, they either quit and leave or they quit and stay."

One of the most important assets a group can have is the expertise of its members. But research indicates that even when everyone within a group recognizes who the subject matter expert is, they defer to that member just 62 percent of the time; when they don't, they listen to the most extroverted person. Another experiment found that "airtime" - the amount of time people spend talking - is a stronger indicator of perceived influence than actual expertise. Our brains also form subtle preferences for people we have met over ones we haven't, and assume people who are good at one thing are also good at other, unrelated things. These biases inevitably end up excluding people and their ideas.

In recruiting, management scholars have found that without systemic evaluation, hiring managers will favor and advocate for candidates who remind them of themselves. This plays out in meetings, too, where diversity goals can be undermined by these messy proxies to the extent that we use proxies that hinder particular groups: Height gives men and people from certain nations (whose populations tend to be taller) an advantage, and loudness disadvantages introverts and people with cultural backgrounds that tend to foster soft-spokenness. This phenomenon applies to both psychological and demographic diversity.

People are not naturally skilled at figuring out who they should be listening to. But by combining organizational and social psychology with neuroscience, we can get a clearer picture of why we're so habitually and mistakenly deferential, and then understand how we can work to prevent that from happening.

How Proxies Play Out in the Brain

The brain uses shortcuts to manage the vast amounts of information that it processes every minute in any given social situation. These shortcuts allow our nonconscious brain to deal with sorting the large volume of data while freeing up capacity in our conscious brain for dealing with whatever cognitive decision making is at hand. This process serves us well in many circumstances, such as having the reflex to, say, duck when someone throws a bottle at our head. But it can be harmful in other circumstances, such as when shortcuts lead us to fall for false expertise.

At a cognitive level, the biases that lead us to believe false expertise are similarity ("People like me are better than people who aren't like me"); experience ("My perceptions of the world must be accurate"); and expedience ("If it feels right, it must be true"). These shortcuts cause us to evaluate people on the basis of proxies - things such as height, extroversion, gender, and other characteristics that don't matter, rather than more meaningful ones.

Although we humans may have biased brains, we also have the capacity to nudge ourselves toward more rational thinking.

The behavioral account of this pattern was first captured by breakthrough research from Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky, which eventually led to a Nobel Prize in Economic Science for Kahneman, and his bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow. Their distinction between so-called System 1 thinking, a "hot" form of cognition involving instinct, quick reactions, and automatic responses, and System 2 "cool" thinking, or careful reflection and analysis, is very important here. System 1 thinking can be seen as a sort of autopilot. It's helpful in certain situations involving obvious, straightforward decisions - such as the ducking-the-bottle example. But in more complicated decision-making contexts, it can cause more harm than good - for instance, by allowing the person with the highest rank in the meeting to decide the best way forward, rather than the person with the best idea.

Taking Steps to Combat Your Own Decision-Making Bias

Given the extent to which Western business culture puts a premium on individualism and fast decision making, it's understandable that so many people have been trained to go their own way as quickly and confidently as possible. The good news is that with the right systems in place, people can be trained to approach problem solving in a different, less bias-ridden way.

Although we cannot block a biased assumption of which we are unaware, we can consciously make an effort to direct our attention to the specific information we need to evaluate, and to weigh it consciously. Just about any sort of decision can get hijacked by mental shortcuts, so it's useful to have a few tools to nudge yourself and others toward more reflective, rigorous, and objective thinking.

Set up "if-then" plans. To guide attention back from these proxies of expertise, you can formulate "if-then" plans, which help the anterior cingulate cortex - a brain region that allows us to detect errors and flag conflicting information - find differences between our actual behavior and our preferred behavior. By incorporating this type of bias-mitigation plan before we enter into a situation where we know a decision will be made, we increase our chances of making optimal decisions.

For example, you can say to yourself: " If I catch myself agreeing with everything a dominant, charismatic person is saying in a meeting, then I will privately ask a third person (not the presenter or the loudest person) to repeat the information, shortly after the meeting, to see if I still agree."

Get explicit, and get it in writing. One fairly easy intervention is to instruct employees to get in the habit of laying out, in writing, the precise steps that led to a given decision being made. You also can write out the process for your own decision making.

For example, narratives in the form of "We decided X, which led us to conclude Y, which is why we're going with strategy Z" bring a certain transparency and clarity to the decision-making process and serve as a record that can be referenced later to evaluate which aspects of the process worked and which didn't.

Incentivize awareness. Along those same lines, managers should reward employees who detect flaws in their thinking and correct course. At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we have a "mistake of the month" section in our monthly work-in-progress meetings to help model and celebrate this kind of admission.

To use a sports example, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady reportedly pays his defense if they can intercept his passes in practice. (It must help. He's one of two players in NFL history to win five Super Bowls.) The takeaway: By making error detection a team sport, you destigmatize the situation, highlight the learning opportunities, and increase the likelihood of making better decisions in the future.

Set up buffers. Taking your decision making from "hot" to "cool" often requires a conscious commitment to create a buffer between when you receive information and when you make a decision on how to move forward.

For example, before a big decision is officially made, everyone involved should be encouraged to spend 10 minutes relaxing or going for a walk before reconvening one last time to discuss any potential issues that haven't yet come up. This is a way of "cooling off" and making sure things have been thought through calmly. Another way to accomplish this is to engage in a "pre-mortem" - imagining a given decision went poorly and then working backward to try to understand why. Doing so can help identify biases that might otherwise go undetected.

Cut the cues. The most common and research-backed approach involves giving hirers access to fewer of the sorts of cues that can trigger expedience biases. Blind selection is a classic example. In the 1970s and 1980s, top orchestras instituted a blind selection process in which the identity of applicants was concealed from the hiring committee, often by literally hiding the player behind a screen while he or she performed. As a result, the number of female musicians in the top five U.S. symphony orchestras rose from 5 percent in 1970 to more than 25 percent in 1996.

Bonner, the Utah psychologist, says to "take the humanity out" when you can. "Set up situations where people exchange information with as little noise as possible," he says. If you're brainstorming, have everyone write down their ideas on index cards or on shared documents, then review the ideas anonymously - that way the strength of the idea, rather than the status of the source, will be the most powerful thing.

Technology can also be leveraged. For example, the "merit-based matching" app Blendoor strips the name, gender, and photos of an applicant from a recruiter's view, and Talent Sonar uses predictive analytics to shape job listings that attract both male and female candidates, and performs a blind resume review, which leads to a 30 percent larger hiring pool, the company says.

Biases are human - a function of our brains - and falling for them doesn't make us malicious. We have the capacity to nudge ourselves toward more rational thinking, to identify and correct the errors we make as a result of bias, and to build institutions that promote good, clear thinking and decision making. With the right systems, tools, and awareness in place, we can better cultivate the best ideas from the most well-suited minds. It just takes a bit of effort, and in the long run pays off in big ways. The best ideas get a chance to be heard - and implemented - and your best thinkers are recognized and keep on thinking.

Author Profile:

Khalil Smith heads the diversity and inclusion practice at the NeuroLeadership Institute. He has 20-plus years of experience in leadership, strategy, and HR, including more than 14 years at Apple Inc.

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Why Our Brains Fall for False Expertise, and How to Stop It

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At the beginning of every meeting, a question hangs in the air: Who will be heard? The answer has huge implications not only for decision making, but for the levels of diversity and inclusion throughout the organization. Being heard is a matter of whose ideas get included - and who, therefore, reaps the accompanying career benefits - and whose ideas get left behind.

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Use this form to track progress

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Education Week - The Art of Coaching Teachers

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Curious how I think about planning a coaching session? Read on. Last week I did an activity with coaches in which I demonstrated how I plan a coaching conversation. I partnered with a coach, who provided an authentic scenario, and then used the Planning for a Coaching Conversation.doc to prepare. I verbalized just about every thought that went through my mind as I prepared for this conversation. Here they are, every thought...

Background: I am a new coach this year at a middle school, I'm focused on literacy. The teacher we are planning for has 15 yrs experience but is in his 2nd year at this school and has no experience teaching 6th grade. Last year I was a teacher, I was his colleague. Last year John did not work with a coach. Coaching is new to him, as is the content and grade level.

The concerns in his class are that there is a lack of rigor and urgency. He isn't invested in changing his instructional practices. He agrees to do things when we meet during coaching sessions, but there is no follow through. My concern right now is that he was supposed to start using the writing resources, and agreed to do so, but on Monday he wasn't using them. He said he decided to do work on short story comprehension instead. He often makes statements like, "These kids can't do that." I've just set up a schedule to work together more often. He does participate 1/week in PLC.
Planning:
I scan through the questions on Planning for a Coaching Conversation.doc and identify the ones that feel most important to respond to. I'm considering that I only have 10 minutes to prepare for this conversation, and while ideally I need more time to prepare for this conversation, I don't have it. So what can I do in 10 minutes of planning?

Here are the questions that feel important to answer:
#3) What's my intention for this conversation?
This feels important and is connected to #12 (Who do I want to be in this conversation? Who does my client need me to be?). My intention for this meeting is that I need to get the teacher enrolled in looking at his practice and thinking about making changes. To do that I need to find a way to extend myself and build my relationship with him. My intention is going to be to show up as a potential partner in the work - which makes me jump to question #12. I'm really aware of who I need to be. Right now I'm really aware that I feel frustrated and annoyed and I don't like him and I don't like the way he talks about kids. I'm also tired and I don't like having to come back to the same things over and over. I also feel ineffective as a coach--why can't I get him to be reflective and improve? But if I walk into his classroom this way, I won't be effective. I'll be walking in with an attitude of: You are wrong and bad, and you make me feel like I suck as a coach. So I know I need to shift this.
#13) How do I want to feel after this conversation?
This question is really important to me also to think about before this session. After the session, I want to feel like I was true to myself and my core values. My core values are compassion, justice and community. And so I really want to show up as someone with compassion, and I also want to take steps to build a more equitable classroom. So after this session, I want to feel inspired and hopeful. I want to feel like I found a way to set aside my frustration. I want to access my compassion for others. I really want to show up as compassionate, without judgment. I know I need to be patient. I need to see the big picture and take the long view because this teacher isn't going to change over night or in one conversation. I suspect that he has many gaps--a knowledge gap around working with sixth graders, perhaps knowledge of this content area, and skill gaps also in teaching reading and writing. I don't know if he has skills for working with kids who are below grade level, in how to differentiate and scaffold their learning. I don't know what PD has he had in any of these areas. I don't know if that PD has been enough--but teachers rarely get enough PD in these areas. How do I know he can use the writing resource? Maybe he's not using it because he doesn't know how and he doesn't want to appear as a failure. So then his ego gets involved.

I'm realizing in this thinking aloud that I don't know that much about him. What else do I need do know? I don't know what skills he does bring. I don't know what his strengths are. I don't know clearly what his gaps are. I need to figure these things out so that I'm effectively directing my energy. I know I'll be more effective and feel better if I can use my limited time and energy in a strategic way.

#2) What are my goals for this conversation?

My goal for this conversation is that he ends up willing to do some co-planning and co-teaching with me. I want him to agree, to put it on a calendar. I suspect that he has big gaps in many areas and a need for scaffolded and structured support. As a coach, I've often been ineffective when I overestimated a client's ZPD I have thought or said, "Here's the new curriculum--let's go!" I've dumped it a big fat curriculum guide on the desk of a new teacher who can't even find his rosters. And then I've been frustrated when he didn't implement it. So I've learned that I have to break down the steps and scaffold the learning of an adult the way I did with a 6th grader. I forget to do that with adults. I want my goal for him to be onboard with explicit next steps.
#4) What can I anticipate about his disposition?
He might be defensive. He might be externalizing the blame--going to "these kids," as if it's their fault, saying "I have so much to do, I have SLOs, I can't do anything more." That's what I'm thinking about--he might externalize blame.
#5) How can I prepare for and manage these challenges?
I'll see what happens if I use compassion, lead with compassion and empathy, and then help him see what is in his sphere of his control. I want to emphasize that our work will be to identify our next steps as partners, that my responsibility as a coach is to facilitate his growth, to guide it, to be alongside him as he develops these teaching practices. I hope that if I show up in this way it'll mitigate his defensive disposition.
#7) How can I make him see the conversation matters?
This is important. When he says "these kids can't..." he's writing them off. Is he invested in changing his practice for his kids? How can I make it matter? The one thing he does care about, that he mentions frequently, is that he wants to get a good evaluation from our principal. While that's not the most transformational place for us to start from, I'll take it. This is his ego coming into the picture--and I'll use that. Sometimes our ego shows up in the legacy we want to leave for students or colleagues, and sometimes it's in terms of our evaluation. We'll go with anything we can right now -and if evaluation is an entry point, that's great.
#8) Of the six coaching stances, are there any that I might want to use?
I am nervous about using the confrontational stance and I often stay away from it. I realize that I might need to explore this and perhaps use it--because at some point I need to bring up the "these kids" comments. I know that what's behind those comments are references to our black and brown kids, to low income kids. I need to surface and shift these beliefs if this work is going to be transformational.

I don't know if this conversation is the time, but I might see what happens if I can explore how to be both compassionate and confrontational. I want to start provoking some cognitive dissonance around "these kids." That might sound like me asking him something like, "I've heard you say numerous times, 'these kids can't, these kids never'... what do you mean when you say that?" I want to let him know that I've heard these comments, registered them, noted them down, and am willing to come back and explore them.

Okay, my 10 minutes of planning are up.

Stay tuned for the transcript of the conversation. I'll share it soon!

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Planning for Coaching Conversations: A Think-Aloud

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Curious how I think about planning a coaching session? Read on. Last week I did an activity with coaches in which I demonstrated how I plan a coaching conversation. I partnered with a coach, who provided an authentic scenario, and then used the Planning for a Coaching Conversation.doc to prepare.

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Use these prompts to plan out your first conversation

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Albert Einstein once said that if he had an hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and five minutes finding the solution. This suggestion gets to the heart of coaching in proposing a ratio of thinking to acting in response to what we perceive as a problem. It's a reminder to slow down and deeply analyze a situation before offering suggestions to remedy it.
I often feel that 90% of coaching is invisible and inaudible to an observer; the art of coaching is the thought process that takes place in the mind in of a coach. The more complex those thought processes are, the more likely it is that what the coach says and does will be transformational.
As my coaching has developed, I've learned to watch and listen to my own thinking while I'm working with a client. What I've observed is that my mind uses a series of analytical frameworks through which I explore what I'm hearing. These analytical frameworks give me insight and perspective that I might not otherwise see if I was just looking through my default frameworks (we all have these). Therefore, they direct me to respond in a way that might open up solutions.
Mind the Gap
One of the frameworks that I rely on is what I call the "Mind the Gap" Framework: Mind the Gap.doc This rests on the assumption that in order to successfully accomplish a task, we need four things:

1. The skills to do it-the technical skills

2. The knowledge about content or pedagogy

3. The will-the desire, passion, motivation

4. The capacity-the mental, emotional, or physical ability, and

5. The emotional intelligence-the ability to be aware of, manage and express one's emotions and be aware of other's emotions.

So when I hear a teacher describing something he's struggling with, I think, Is there a skill gap here? A knowledge gap? A will gap? Where is the gap? Usually, if not always, there's a gap somewhere. This framework reminds me to "mind," to pay attention to, surface, and identify the gap.
Often there are multiple gaps-a skill gap can create a will gap: it's hard to want to do something that you don't know how to do. There might also be a fragment of a knowledge gap tangled up, and my job as a coach is to pull apart this complex puzzle and figure out exactly what those gaps are, and how big they are, and then how to help the client close the gaps.
Exercise Gap-Diagnosis Caution
One thing I've learned when using this framework is that sometimes what I perceive as a will gap is really a skill gap. I find this more common in working with teachers or administrators who have been in their field for some time and may have some embarrassment about the fact that they haven't acquired some new skill (say, creating Excel spreadsheets) and so it manifests as what sounds like a will gap: "I don't want to do that, we can share this data in the way we always have."
Or what I think is a skill gap is actually a gap in emotional intelligence. I might hear a lot of requests for support in developing a particular kind of lesson (group work or cooperative learning, for example) and the teacher might ask for endless kinds of support ("I've never done that, can you model it? I will need to get piles of supplies for that, I think I need to observe someone else teaching that first..."). When I dig around, what I find is that underneath what might look like skill gaps there are feelings of anxiety about losing control of the class. If I don't also coach around those gaps, then I might not get anywhere just coaching the skill gaps.
I've learned to be cautious about jumping to gap-diagnosis and to think through an inquiry lens: could this be a capacity gap? What is the capacity needed to successfully fulfill this task? How can I assess this teacher's capacity? What else might I need to ask or know before I determine that this is a capacity gap? Asking myself all of these questions leads me into a place from which I can act and speak that often gets to the heart of the matter faster.
Using this Framework with Clients
I also share this framework with clients. This can sound like, "What I'm hearing is that you have some skill gaps. That's great! Skill gaps are easy to learn-they're just skills. With my coaching support, you can acquire new skills, right?" People are often relieved when you can contain their struggles into a domain from which there are next steps. You can also say something like, "I hear that you have some knowledge gaps. Does that sound accurate? Let's get around to closing those, ok?"
Here's a glance at what happens next (at the response we take after an accurate diagnosis): at this point in the conversation, the next step is to list out what we both see as those knowledge or skill gaps. We identify the task the teacher is trying to accomplish (cooperative learning, for example) and then list out the skills she'll need to master in order to effectively do this. This is just the beginning of what the coaching will look like-but these actions emerge from a deep analysis of what's going on for the client.
By the way, I've found that knowledge and skill gaps are the easiest to close, where as capacity and emotional intelligence are harder, and will gaps are very hard to close-but true will gaps are fairly rare. Remember that these gaps are all intertwined and making movement in closing one will affect the others.
I always carry around copies of this framework, printed out in these pretty colors (the colors help our brains remember this information) and I offer these sheets to people I'm coaching. This helps them understand what they may be experiencing as overwhelming ( How will I ever gain control of my class!) and see their dilemmas in a manageable way.
Finally, I use this framework when I'm coaching myself (and I do that quite often). When I recognize that I'm struggling with something or someone, I ask myself, Elena, do you have a skill gap in working with this client? Or is it a will gap? Where's the gap? There's always a gap-perhaps I don't know enough yet about the client or his context, perhaps I don't know enough about the decision he needs to make, perhaps I don't know how he learns best or what style of coaching will be most effective with him; perhaps I'm feeling some mixed emotions about coaching her, perhaps I'm emotionally triggered by what she says about kids, perhaps I'm stretched too thin and just don't have the capacity to coach this person. When I can accurately identify the gap, I can figure out how to take effective action.
The concept that we have skill, will, knowledge, capacity and emotional intelligence gaps is just one analytical tool for figuring out what's going on with someone. I didn't develop it-and I don't know who did (it's referenced in a number of books and used in many workshops I've attended) but it's a very useful one. However, it's not the only one I use. There are several additional frameworks for analysis that my brain runs through when I'm coaching. I'll describe these in upcoming posts.
For now, let me leave you with hopefully a recognition and appreciation of how complicated coaching is! This is, however, why I love this field-it's so extensive and exciting and complex. Here's the framework again, for you to print out Mind the Gap.doc

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A Coaching Framework For Thinking Before Acting - Bright Morning

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Albert Einstein once said that if he had an hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and five minutes finding the solution. This suggestion gets to the heart of coaching in proposing a ratio of thinking to acting in response to what we perceive as a problem.

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What can you count during a classroom visit?

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Use this form to track your agreed upon Look-Fors and observations

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Leaders have to give feedback and performance appraisals have to be made. This is a given. Yet, there are many times when feedforward is preferable to feedback in day-to-day interactions. Feedforward is a group exercise, the purpose of which is to provide individuals with suggestions for the future and to help them achieve a positive change in the behaviors as selected by them. Aside from its effectiveness and efficiency, feedforward can make life a lot more enjoyable. (For a more detailed description of the Feedforward, please see the Marshall Goldsmith Thinkers50 Video entitled Feedforward: Coaching for Behavioral Change, week 17.)

Here are 10 reasons participants in my classes see feedforward as fun and helpful as opposed to painful, embarrassing, or uncomfortable. These descriptions provide a great explanation of why feedforward can often be more useful than feedback as a developmental tool.

1. We can change the future. We can't change the past. Feedforward helps people envision and focus on a positive future, not a failed past. By giving people ideas on how they can be even more successful (as opposed to visualizing a failed past), we can increase their chances of achieving this success in the future.

2. It can be more productive to help people learn to be "right," than prove they were "wrong." Negative feedback often becomes an exercise in "let me prove you were wrong." Feedforward, on the other hand, is almost always seen as positive because it focuses on solutions - not problems.

3. Feedforward is especially suited to successful people. Successful people like getting ideas that are aimed at helping them achieve their goals. They tend to resist negative judgment. I have observed many successful executives respond to (and even enjoy) feedforward. I am not sure that these same people would have had such a positive reaction to feedback.

4. Feedforward can come from anyone who knows about the task. It does not require personal experience with the individual. One very common positive reaction to the previously described exercise is that participants are amazed by how much they can learn from people that they don't know!

5. People do not take feedforward as personally as feedback. In theory, constructive feedback is supposed to "focus on the performance, not the person". In practice, almost all feedback is taken personally (no matter how it is delivered). Feedforward cannot involve a personal critique, since it is discussing something that has not yet happened!

6. Feedback can reinforce personal stereotyping and negative self-fulfilling prophecies. Feedforward can reinforce the possibility of change. Feedback can reinforce the feeling of failure. Negative feedback can be used to reinforce the message, "this is just the way you are". Feedforward is based on the assumption that the receiver of suggestions can make positive changes in the future.

7. Face it! Most of us hate getting negative feedback, and we don't like to give it. I have reviewed summary 360 feedback reports from many companies. The items "provides developmental feedback in a timely manner" and "encourages and accepts constructive criticism" always score near the bottom on co-worker satisfaction with leaders. It's clear that leaders are not very good at giving or receiving negative feedback. It is unlikely that this will change in the near future.

8. Feedforward tends to be much faster and more efficient than feedback. An excellent technique for giving ideas to successful people is to say, "Here are four ideas for the future. Please accept these in the positive spirit that they are given and ignore what doesn't make sense for you." With this approach almost no time gets wasted on judging the quality of the ideas or "proving that the ideas are wrong".

9. Feedforward can be a useful tool to apply with managers, peers, and team members. Rightly or wrongly, feedback is associated with judgment. This can lead to very negative - or even career-limiting - unintended consequences when applied to managers or peers. Feedforward does not imply superiority of judgment. As such it can be easier to hear from a person who is not in a position of power or authority.

10. People tend to listen more attentively to feedforward than feedback. One participant in the feedforward exercise noted, "I think that I listened more effectively in this exercise than I ever do at work!" When asked why, he responded, "Normally, when others are speaking, I am so busy composing a reply that will make sure that I sound smart - that I am not fully listening to what the other person is saying I am just composing my response. In feedforward the only reply that I am allowed to make is 'thank you'. Since I don't have to worry about composing a clever reply - I can focus all of my energy on listening to the other person!"

Quality communication--between and among people at all levels and every department and division--is the glue that holds organizations together. By using feedforward--and by encouraging others to use it--leaders can dramatically improve the quality of communication in their organizations, ensuring that the right message is conveyed, and that those who receive it are receptive to its content. The result is a much more dynamic, much more open organization--one whose employees focus on the promise of the future rather than dwelling on the mistakes of the past. Try it for yourself and see!

Please view the Marshall Goldsmith Thinkers50 Video Blog. The next short video in the series Coaching for Behavioral Change: Feed forward accompanies this article. I'll post these blogs once a week for the next 50 weeks. The series will incorporate learnings from my 38 years of experience with top executives, as well as material from my previous research, articles and books, including What Got You Here Won't Get You There, MOJO, Coaching for Leadership, and Succession: Are You Ready? The blogs will also include material from my exciting new research on engagement and my upcoming book Triggers (to be published by Crown in 2015).

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Leaders have to give feedback and performance appraisals have to be made. This is a given. Yet, there are many times when feedforward is preferable to feedback in day-to-day interactions. Feedforward is a group exercise, the purpose of which is to provide individuals with suggestions for the future and to help them achieve a positive change in the behaviors as selected by them.

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Vol. 70

No. 1

Abstract

What Is Feedback, Anyway?

Feedback Essentials

Progress Toward a Goal

"But There's No Time!"

Advice, evaluation, grades-none of these provide the descriptive information that students need to reach their goals. What is true feedback-and how can it improve learning?

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Abstract

What Is Feedback, Anyway?

Feedback Essentials

Progress Toward a Goal

"But There's No Time!"

Who would dispute the idea that feedback is a good thing? Both common sense and research make it clear: Formative assessment, consisting of lots of feedback and opportunities to use that feedback, enhances performance and achievement.

Yet even John Hattie (2008), whose decades of research revealed that feedback was among the most powerful influences on achievement, acknowledges that he has "struggled to understand the concept" (p. 173). And many writings on the subject don't even attempt to define the term. To improve formative assessment practices among both teachers and assessment designers, we need to look more closely at just what feedback is-and isn't.

What Is Feedback, Anyway?

The term feedback is often used to describe all kinds of comments made after the fact, including advice, praise, and evaluation. But none of these are feedback, strictly speaking.

Basically, feedback is information about how we are doing in our efforts to reach a goal. I hit a tennis ball with the goal of keeping it in the court, and I see where it lands-in or out. I tell a joke with the goal of making people laugh, and I observe the audience's reaction-they laugh loudly or barely snicker. I teach a lesson with the goal of engaging students, and I see that some students have their eyes riveted on me while others are nodding off.

Here are some other examples of feedback:

A friend tells me, "You know, when you put it that way and speak in that softer tone of voice, it makes me feel better."

A reader comments on my short story, "The first few paragraphs kept my full attention. The scene painted was vivid and interesting. But then the dialogue became hard to follow; as a reader, I was confused about who was talking, and the sequence of actions was puzzling, so I became less engaged."

A baseball coach tells me, "Each time you swung and missed, you raised your head as you swung so you didn't really have your eye on the ball. On the one you hit hard, you kept your head down and saw the ball."

Note the difference between these three examples and the first three I cited-the tennis stroke, the joke, and the student responses to teaching. In the first group, I only had to take note of the tangible effect of my actions, keeping my goals in mind. No one volunteered feedback, but there was still plenty of feedback to get and use. The second group of examples all involved the deliberate, explicit giving of feedback by other people.

Whether the feedback was in the observable effects or from other people, in every case the information received was not advice, nor was the performance evaluated. No one told me as a performer what to do differently or how "good" or "bad" my results were. (You might think that the reader of my writing was judging my work, but look at the words used again: She simply played back the effect my writing had on her as a reader.) Nor did any of the three people tell me what to do (which is what many people erroneously think feedback is-advice). Guidance would be premature; I first need to receive feedback on what I did or didn't do that would warrant such advice.

In all six cases, information was conveyed about the effects of my actions as related to a goal. The information did not include value judgments or recommendations on how to improve. (For examples of information that is often falsely viewed as feedback, see "Feedback vs. Advice" above and "Feedback vs. Evaluation and Grades" on p. 15.)

Decades of education research support the idea that by teaching less and providing more feedback, we can produce greater learning (see Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Hattie, 2008; Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). Compare the typical lecture-driven course, which often produces less-than-optimal learning, with the peer instruction model developed by Eric Mazur (2009) at Harvard. He hardly lectures at all to his 200 introductory physics students; instead, he gives them problems to think about individually and then discuss in small groups. This system, he writes, "provides frequent and continuous feedback (to both the students and the instructor) about the level of understanding of the subject being discussed" (p. 51), producing gains in both conceptual understanding of the subject and problem-solving skills. Less "teaching," more feedback equals better results.

Feedback Essentials

Whether feedback is just there to be grasped or is provided by another person, helpful feedback is goal-referenced; tangible and transparent; actionable; user-friendly (specific and personalized); timely; ongoing; and consistent.

1. Goal-Referenced

Effective feedback requires that a person has a goal, takes action to achieve the goal, and receives goal-related information about his or her actions. I told a joke-why? To make people laugh. I wrote a story to engage the reader with vivid language and believable dialogue that captures the characters' feelings. I went up to bat to get a hit. If I am not clear on my goals or if I fail to pay attention to them, I cannot get helpful feedback (nor am I likely to achieve my goals).

Information becomes feedback if, and only if, I am trying to cause something and the information tells me whether I am on track or need to change course. If some joke or aspect of my writing isn't working -a revealing, nonjudgmental phrase-I need to know.

Note that in everyday situations, goals are often implicit, although fairly obvious to everyone. I don't need to announce when telling the joke that my aim is to make you laugh. But in school, learners are often unclear about the specific goal of a task or lesson, so it is crucial to remind them about the goal and the criteria by which they should self-assess. For example, a teacher might say,

The point of this writing task is for you to make readers laugh. So, when rereading your draft or getting feedback from peers, ask, How funny is this? Where might it be funnier?

As you prepare a table poster to display the findings of your science project, remember that the aim is to interest people in your work as well as to describe the facts you discovered through your experiment. Self-assess your work against those two criteria using these rubrics. The science fair judges will do likewise.

2. Tangible and Transparent

Any useful feedback system involves not only a clear goal, but also tangible results related to the goal. People laugh, chuckle, or don't laugh at each joke; students are highly attentive, somewhat attentive, or inattentive to my teaching.

Even as little children, we learn from such tangible feedback. That's how we learn to walk; to hold a spoon; and to understand that certain words magically yield food, drink, or a change of clothes from big people. The best feedback is so tangible that anyone who has a goal can learn from it.

Alas, far too much instructional feedback is opaque, as revealed in a true story a teacher told me years ago. A student came up to her at year's end and said, "Miss Jones, you kept writing this same word on my English papers all year, and I still don't know what it means." "What's the word? " she asked. "Vag-oo," he said. (The word was vague!)

Sometimes, even when the information is tangible and transparent, the performers don't obtain it-either because they don't look for it or because they are too busy performing to focus on the effects. In sports, novice tennis players or batters often don't realize that they're taking their eyes off the ball; they often protest, in fact, when that feedback is given. (Constantly yelling "Keep your eye on the ball!" rarely works.) And we have all seen how new teachers are sometimes so busy concentrating on "teaching" that they fail to notice that few students are listening or learning.

That's why, in addition to feedback from coaches or other able observers, video or audio recordings can help us perceive things that we may not perceive as we perform; and by extension, such recordings help us learn to look for difficult-to-perceive but vital information. I recommend that all teachers videotape their own classes at least once a month. It was a transformative experience for me when I did it as a beginning teacher. Concepts that had been crystal clear to me when I was teaching seemed opaque and downright confusing on tape-captured also in the many quizzical looks of my students, which I had missed in the moment.

3. Actionable

Effective feedback is concrete, specific, and useful; it provides actionable information. Thus, "Good job!" and "You did that wrong" and B+ are not feedback at all. We can easily imagine the learners asking themselves in response to these comments, What specifically should I do more or less of next time, based on this information? No idea. They don't know what was "good" or "wrong" about what they did.

Actionable feedback must also be accepted by the performer. Many so-called feedback situations lead to arguments because the givers are not sufficiently descriptive; they jump to an inference from the data instead of simply presenting the data. For example, a supervisor may make the unfortunate but common mistake of stating that "many students were bored in class." That's a judgment, not an observation. It would have been far more useful and less debatable had the supervisor said something like, "I counted ongoing inattentive behaviors in 12 of the 25 students once the lecture was underway. The behaviors included texting under desks, passing notes, and making eye contact with other students. However, after the small-group exercise began, I saw such behavior in only one student."

Such care in offering neutral, goal-related facts is the whole point of the clinical supervision of teaching and of good coaching more generally. Effective supervisors and coaches work hard to carefully observe and comment on what they observed, based on a clear statement of goals. That's why I always ask when visiting a class, "What would you like me to look for and perhaps count?" In my experience as a teacher of teachers, I have always found such pure feedback to be accepted and welcomed. Effective coaches also know that in complex performance situations, actionable feedback about what went right is as important as feedback about what didn't work.

4. User-Friendly

Even if feedback is specific and accurate in the eyes of experts or bystanders, it is not of much value if the user cannot understand it or is overwhelmed by it. Highly technical feedback will seem odd and confusing to a novice. Describing a baseball swing to a 6-year-old in terms of torque and other physics concepts will not likely yield a better hitter. Too much feedback is also counterproductive; better to help the performer concentrate on only one or two key elements of performance than to create a buzz of information coming in from all sides.

Expert coaches uniformly avoid overloading performers with too much or too technical information. They tell the performers one important thing they noticed that, if changed, will likely yield immediate and noticeable improvement ("I was confused about who was talking in the dialogue you wrote in this paragraph"). They don't offer advice until they make sure the performer understands the importance of what they saw.

5. Timely

In most cases, the sooner I get feedback, the better. I don't want to wait for hours or days to find out whether my students were attentive and whether they learned, or which part of my written story works and which part doesn't. I say "in most cases" to allow for situations like playing a piano piece in a recital. I don't want my teacher or the audience barking out feedback as I perform. That's why it is more precise to say that good feedback is "timely" rather than "immediate."

A great problem in education, however, is untimely feedback. Vital feedback on key performances often comes days, weeks, or even months after the performance-think of writing and handing in papers or getting back results on standardized tests. As educators, we should work overtime to figure out ways to ensure that students get more timely feedback and opportunities to use it while the attempt and effects are still fresh in their minds.

Before you say that this is impossible, remember that feedback does not need to come only from the teacher, or even from people at all. Technology is one powerful tool-part of the power of computer-assisted learning is unlimited, timely feedback and opportunities to use it. Peer review is another strategy for managing the load to ensure lots of timely feedback; it's essential, however, to train students to do small-group peer review to high standards, without immature criticisms or unhelpful praise.

6. Ongoing

Adjusting our performance depends on not only receiving feedback but also having opportunities to use it. What makes any assessment in education formative is not merely that it precedes summative assessments, but that the performer has opportunities, if results are less than optimal, to reshape the performance to better achieve the goal. In summative assessment, the feedback comes too late; the performance is over.

Thus, the more feedback I can receive in real time, the better my ultimate performance will be. This is how all highly successful computer games work. If you play Angry Birds, Halo, Guitar Hero, or Tetris, you know that the key to substantial improvement is that the feedback is both timely and ongoing. When you fail, you can immediately start over-sometimes even right where you left off-to get another opportunity to receive and learn from the feedback. (This powerful feedback loop is also user-friendly. Games are built to reflect and adapt to our changing need, pace, and ability to process information.)

It is telling, too, that performers are often judged on their ability to adjust in light of feedback. The ability to quickly adapt one's performance is a mark of all great achievers and problem solvers in a wide array of fields. Or, as many little league coaches say, "The problem is not making errors; you will all miss many balls in the field, and that's part of learning. The problem is when you don't learn from the errors."

7. Consistent

To be useful, feedback must be consistent. Clearly, performers can only adjust their performance successfully if the information fed back to them is stable, accurate, and trustworthy. In education, that means teachers have to be on the same page about what high-quality work is. Teachers need to look at student work together, becoming more consistent over time and formalizing their judgments in highly descriptive rubrics supported by anchor products and performances. By extension, if we want student-to-student feedback to be more helpful, students have to be trained to be consistent the same way we train teachers, using the same exemplars and rubrics.

Progress Toward a Goal

In light of these key characteristics of helpful feedback, how can schools most effectively use feedback as part of a system of formative assessment? The key is to gear feedback to long-term goals.

Let's look at how this works in sports. My daughter runs the mile in track. At the end of each lap in races and practice races, the coaches yell out split times (the times for each lap) and bits of feedback ("You're not swinging your arms!" "You're on pace for 5:15"), followed by advice ("Pick it up-you need to take two seconds off this next lap to get in under 5:10!").

My daughter and her teammates are getting feedback (and advice) about how they are performing now compared with their final desired time. My daughter's goal is to run a 5:00 mile. She has already run 5:09. Her coach is telling her that at the pace she just ran in the first lap, she is unlikely even to meet her best time so far this season, never mind her long-term goal. Then, he tells her something descriptive about her current performance (she's not swinging her arms) and gives her a brief piece of concrete advice (take two seconds off the next lap) to make achievement of the goal more likely.

The ability to improve one's result depends on the ability to adjust one's pace in light of ongoing feedback that measures performance against a concrete, long-term goal. But this isn't what most school district "pacing guides" and grades on "formative" tests tell you. They yield a grade against recent objectives taught, not useful feedback against the final performance standards. Instead of informing teachers and students at an interim date whether they are on track to achieve a desired level of student performance by the end of the school year, the guide and the test grade just provide a schedule for the teacher to follow in delivering content and a grade on that content. It's as if at the end of the first lap of the mile race, My daughter's coach simply yelled out, " B+ on that lap!"

The advice for how to change this sad situation should be clear: Score student work in the fall and winter against spring standards, use more pre-and post-assessments to measure progress toward these standards, and do the item analysis to note what each student needs to work on for better future performance.

"But There's No Time!"

Although the universal teacher lament that there's no time for such feedback is understandable, remember that "no time to give and use feedback" actually means "no time to cause learning." As we have seen, research shows that less teaching plus more feedback is the key to achieving greater learning. And there are numerous ways-through technology, peers, and other teachers-that students can get the feedback they need.

So try it out. Less teaching, more feedback. Less feedback that comes only from you, and more tangible feedback designed into the performance itself. And, of course, send me some feedback on this article at gwiggins@authenticeducation.org.

Feedback vs. Advice

› You need more examples in your report.

› You might want to use a lighter baseball bat.

› You should have included some Essential Questions in your unit plan.

These three statements are not feedback; they're advice. Such advice out of the blue seems at best tangential and at worst unhelpful and annoying. Unless it is preceded by descriptive feedback, the natural response of the performer is to wonder, "Why are you suggesting this?"

As coaches, teachers, and parents, we too often jump right to advice without first ensuring that the learner has sought, grasped, and tentatively accepted the feedback on which the advice is based. By doing so, we often unwittingly end up unnerving learners. Students become increasingly insecure about their own judgment and dependent on the advice of experts-and therefore in a panic about what to do when varied advice comes from different people or no advice is available at all.

If your ratio of advice to feedback is too high, try asking the learner, "Given the feedback, do you have some ideas about how to improve?" This approach will build greater autonomy and confidence over the long haul. Once they are no longer rank novices, performers can often self-advise if asked to.

Feedback vs. Evaluation and Grades

› This is a weak paper.

› You got a C on your presentation.

› I'm so pleased by your poster!

These comments make a value judgment. They rate, evaluate, praise, or criticize what was done. There is little or no feedback here-no actionable information about what occurred. As performers, we only know that someone else placed a high or low value on what we did.

How might we recast these comments to be useful feedback? Tip: Always add a mental colon after each statement of value. For example,

"Good work: Your use of words was more precise in this paper than in the last one, and I saw the scenes clearly in my mind's eye."

"This is a weak paper: Almost from the first sentence, I was confused as to your initial thesis and the evidence you provide for it. In the second paragraph you propose a different thesis, and in the third paragraph you don't offer evidence, just beliefs."

You'll soon find that you can drop the evaluative language; it serves no useful function.

The most ubiquitous form of evaluation, grading, is so much a part of the school landscape that we easily overlook its utter uselessness as actionable feedback. Grades are here to stay, no doubt-but that doesn't mean we should rely on them as a major source of feedback.

References

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Hattie, J. (2008). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York: Routledge.

Mazur, E. (2009, January 2). Farewell, lecture? Science, 323, 50-51.

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Advice, evaluation, grades-none of these provide the descriptive information that students need to reach their goals. What is true feedback-and how can it improve learning?

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These questions are a handy reference to use during all steps

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What's going well and what are next steps?

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Education Week - The Art of Coaching Teachers

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"I've probably invested 100 hours of coaching into her this year," Alex said, "and I don't think she's made much improvement." Alex looked exasperated. "Was that a waste? Should I keep coaching her? Can she improve?" Alex, a secondary math and science coach, was talking about his work with Sandy, a new teacher in his school. Ultimately, he was wondering whether Sandy should be released, or retained for another year.

Alex was grappling with one of the most common challenges for coaches and administrators when working with new or struggling teachers: How much coaching do you invest, and how long do you wait, to see how much growth in practice? What constitutes enough growth for a teacher receiving coaching? How do we know if coaching is "working?"

To answer these questions we need to consider the focus and goals for coaching, measurements for growth, the teacher's "coachability," the coach's duties and responsibilities, and the applicant pool for the position.
Focus and Goals for Coaching
Effective coaching is anchored in specific, measurable, time-bound goals. These goals must be anchored in a teacher's professional practice and must reflect the highest leverage strategies that can impact student learning. For example, a good goal might be something like, I use a variety of formative assessments every week and the data from those assessments guides me in revising my lesson plans. Or I develop positive relationships with students and survey results from students on their enjoyment of and learning in my class improve by 80 percent.

Coaching needs to be focused. When I asked Alex what he was coaching Sandy on in those 100 hours, he said, "Just about everything. We've talked about curriculum, we worked on writing grants, we organized the classroom, we talked about student behavior when they do experiments, we talked about how to deal with the stress and fatigue of teaching and so much more." This can be typical, I assured Alex, when we're working with new teachers. Their needs are extensive. But sometimes it can also make it hard to answer the question Is she improving?, because the goal hasn't been sharply defined. Having a goal doesn't mean you can't or don't talk about a lot of other things-it just means the coaching is directed toward one clear end.

One way to identify goals or a focus could be to use a framework like this one, Mind the Gap, which categorizes ability into six groups. All teachers need skills, knowledge, capacity, will, emotional intelligence and cultural competence to be effective in the classroom ( here's a graphic depicting this). While EI and Cultural Competence are foundational, and worthy of focus, they are harder to build than skill or knowledge. Building skill--for example, skill in using classroom routines and procedures--can help a teacher address the root cause of common student misbehavior that can trigger a teacher emotionally.

I often suggest that a teacher has 2-3 goals, depending somewhat on how much coaching they'll receive. (Ideally, a coach works with a teacher a few times a month-observing instruction and debriefing/planning/reflecting.) At least one goal should be connected to the teacher's professional practice goals and/or to school wide initiatives. Ideally, the teacher would be able to identify one goal that really matters to them-a goal around work/life balance, or classroom organization, and so on.
Measurements for Successful Coaching
When coaching is focused and has a sharply articulated goal, we can identify indicators of success. For example, if a teacher's goal is to use formative assessment to guide instruction, then a teacher can explain when and how she used formative assessment data to make decisions about instruction. Then a coach has "evidence" that "coaching is working." The measurements for the impact of coaching, of the goal being met, need to be articulated when coaching begins. Imagine if we didn't have goals for student learning, or any idea what it would look like if we reached those? We can draw many parallels between coaching and guiding the learning of adults to teaching and guiding the learning of children. We can transfer many of the ways we think about and teach children to how we coach adults.

"Coachability"

One of the first questions I asked Alex when he described his uncertainty about Sandy was whether she was coachable. "Oh yes," he said. Good, I thought. Whether someone is coachable, how receptive they are to coaching, is a key factor in this question. Coachability is evident in someone's openness to coaching, follow through on agreements-including the agreement to meet with their coach, receptivity to feedback, ability to reflect and see their own growth areas and strengths, and willingness to take risks. Coachability assumes skill on the part of the coach, and that the coach can foster a strong and trusting relationship-it's really hard to be coachable if your coach is unskilled and judgmental and sees you as a problem to fix. But if the coach is skilled, then I hope to see a client who is willing to take a hard look at their practice and then take risks to improve it.

Coach Duties and Responsibilities

Another factor in whether or not a teacher can improve, and a coach should keep working with them, has to do with the coach's duties. What is the coach responsible for? What else would the coach be doing if he wasn't investing 100 hours into a struggling teacher? Are there teachers who could benefit tremendously from coaching but who aren't getting it because all of the coach's energy and time is going to the most struggling teacher? There are no clear cut answers to these questions-but they do imply that the coach's job needs to be sharply defined. Schools (and districts and networks) need a clear vision for coaching, goals for a coaching program, and focused roles and responsibilities for coaches, or else the potential of coaching is weak. Many coaches are spread so thin, doing a little bit of everything, working in reactive mode to the latest crisis-and that's the problem, not the struggling teacher. If we used our resources effectively, if coaching was strategic and focused and intentional, we'd see a lot more teacher growth.
The Applicant Pool
The final consideration in Alex's case, or when trying to decide whether to retain a teacher and continue investing coaching into her, is to glance out at the pool of applicants for that teacher's position. If you think you could have a number of qualified and skilled candidates, then it might make sense to release a teacher who has struggled in spite of 100 hours of effective, focused coaching. In most places that I coach or consult, the applicant pool is shallow and I often encourage people to grow their talent rather than continuously hire new people. In Alex's case, secondary math and science teachers (even in the well-funded suburban district that he's in) are hard to come by.

As we talked through Alex's work with Sandy this year, it became clear that because he didn't guide her to concrete goals and indicators of success, it was hard to see Sandy's growth. She was all over the place in coaching because they hadn't focused on the highest leverage areas for growth. Going forward, Alex thought it would be best to using coaching time to focus on increasing the rigor in her lessons and releasing more cognitive responsibility to students--and not to finding additional grants or to organizing classroom supplies. Sandy's coachability was another clear indicator that she would benefit from coaching--she had consistently been an open learner. By the end of our conversation, Alex felt confident that as he refined his own coaching skills, Sandy could also refine her teaching practice. He wholeheartedly recommended that she continue teaching at his school.

In order to evaluate whether coaching is "working" for someone, we need to take a look at the big picture in which the coaching is happening--including at the coach's skills and the vision and purpose of the coaching program. Most of the time the conversations that I have with coaches about whether coaching is working lead us to this big picture place, and to the realization that there's a lot they need to do to refine their coaching program before determining that a teacher isn't learning. So when you ask whether coaching is working, make sure to look at the big picture.

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"I've probably invested 100 hours of coaching into her this year," Alex said, "and I don't think she's made much improvement." Alex looked exasperated. "Was that a waste? Should I keep coaching her? Can she improve?" Alex, a secondary math and science coach, was talking about his work with Sandy, a new teacher in his school.

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Get feedback on your coaching

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Stay organized during the entire cycle

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Listen to my interview with Joe Hirsch (transcript):
Sponsored by Kiddom and Pear Deck

As teachers, we pretty much give feedback all day long. We tell students how they can improve on assignments, we praise them for things they're doing well, we correct their incorrect responses, and we redirect them when they behave in ways that aren't helpful to learning.

And that's just the students. We also give feedback to our colleagues, although in most cases, these exchanges don't happen as often or as freely as they probably should. We receive plenty of feedback as well, from our students, their parents, our administrators, and our peers. And we encourage our students to give feedback to each other, albeit with pretty uneven results. Really, the experience of school could be described as one long feedback session, where every day, people show up with the goal of improving, while other people tell them how to do it.

And it doesn't always go well. As we give and receive feedback, people get defensive. Feelings get hurt. Too often, the improvements we're going for don't happen, because the feedback isn't given in a way that the receiver can embrace.

It turns out there's a different way to give feedback that works a lot better, a way of flipping its focus from the past to the future. It's a concept called "feedforward," which was originally developed by a management expert named Marshall Goldsmith. As far as I can tell, not a lot of educators are familiar with the practice of feedforward, and I really think if we learned how to do it and started using it more consistently, it could make a huge difference in how our students grow and how we grow as professionals.

In this week's podcast, I interview Joe Hirsch, author of The Feedback Fix: Dump the Past, Embrace the Future, and Lead the Way to Change. ( Bookshop.org | Amazon). In the book, Joe digs deep into the practice of feedforward and shows us how and why it works. You can listen to our full conversation in the player above, read the full transcript, or stay right here-I'll give you a quick overview.

What's Wrong with the Way We Give Feedback?

When we give feedback to our students, or when our co-workers or administrators give feedback to us, the focus is on the past. "People can't control what they can't change, and we can't change the past," says Hirsch. "And that happens to be the focus of most of the feedback that we give or receive."

More specifically, backward-looking feedback doesn't often get good results for three reasons:

It shuts down our mental dashboards. "When we get negative feedback about something that we can't change or control," Hirsch says, "our brains flood with stress-inducing hormones, cortisol, that trigger our threat awareness and put us on the defensive. The parts that are responsible for executive function, for creativity, the parts that allow us to sort of set our agendas and make rational decisions, essentially we are in a state of mental paralysis."

It focuses primarily on ratings, not on development. Most of feedback's time and energy is spent on looking back and rating (or grading) performance that's already over, rather than focusing on what can be done from now on. "When feedback consists of an impersonal set of performance standards, we're overlooking the essential goal of feedback, and that's to create positive and lasting improvement."

It reinforces negative behaviors. "When we hear about flaws that we can't fix anymore-because they're in a past that we can't change-it creates a feeling of learned helplessness, the feeling that we are unable to do anything about our future. Instead of committing ourselves to improvement, which is what we would hope would happen, we hold onto this debilitating view of who we are instead of focusing on who we are becoming."

What is Feedforward?

When we give feedforward, instead of rating and judging a person's performance in the past, we focus on their development in the future.

Suppose my student is writing an essay. Instead of waiting until she is finished, then marking up all the errors and giving it a grade, I would read parts of the essay while she is writing it, point out things I'm noticing, and ask her questions to get her thinking about how she might improve it.

In his book, Hirsch takes this broad concept of feedforward and defines six components of it, six specific characteristics of feedforward that make it so effective. He refers to these by the acronym REPAIR (regenerates, expands, particular, authentic, impact, refines).

So let's take a look at each of these. If you want to implement feedforward well, it should have these attributes:

It REGENERATES talent.

The most effective kind of feedforward helps people see opportunities for growth-ways they could take on new opportunities and roles. "At the simplest level," Hirsch writes in his book, "it leads to the unmistakable feeling that we're moving forward in our professional and personal lives. Getting positive feedback about our performance may feel good, but it doesn't break new ground. It merely confirms what we already know about ourselves and our talents, essentially holding our growth in check. But when feedback gets us thinking about how to spread that talent to others, it has a multiplying effect."

So when we notice that a student is developing a strength or an interest in an area, instead of just pointing that out, we might give the student an opportunity to enter their work in some kind of competition, publish it in some way, or share it with others in a presentation, rather than simply keeping it to themselves. This helps students see themselves in a new light and gets them thinking about ways they could grow.

It EXPANDS possibilities.

Effective feedback starts with what is and helps add to it, expanding what's possible, rather than simply pointing out problems. In his book, Hirsch describes a concept used by Pixar studios called "plussing." When Pixar's creators get together to review a day's work, they are expected to give each other feedback to improve the work. What makes these sessions so effective is one important rule: Participants can't point out a problem without proposing an alternative, saying "What if?" to a problem.

This concept of "plussing" could work wonders in staff or committee meetings: When we are discussing possible solutions to an issue, rather than shooting down ideas that might not work, we could add to them by making small tweaks. "That's an interesting idea. What if we made this small change and tried that?" This technique would also work beautifully with project-based learning tasks, when students may need to come up with several ideas for solving a problem before arriving at the best solution.

It is PARTICULAR.

Far too often, feedback is given in an "information dump," with lots of criteria being measured and reported on at the same time. This can be a pretty ineffective way to help people grow. "There's a limit to how much we can absorb and operationalize in any given time," Hirsch says. "Feedforward is really about picking your battlegrounds strategically and selectively." He advises us to make feedback an ongoing process that is embedded in the day-to-day work, and to only focus on a few things at a time.

So rather than wait until an assignment is done to point out all the ways a student can improve, find ways to give them specific pointers while they work, and only one thing at a time, so students can process and act on it right away.

It is AUTHENTIC.

No one particularly likes giving criticism. "We see problems, we see pitfalls in other people, and we know it's a problem," Hirsch says, "but we don't want to be mean, right? We don't want to crush them. So the tendency is to either avoid giving feedback altogether or to disguise it as a praise sandwich, where we basically slip one piece of criticism in between two very, very surface level gauzy praises."

The problem with that approach, Hirsch explains, is what's called the recency effect: People remember most the thing they heard last. So when you tack on some praise after delivering constructive feedback, the person doesn't really absorb the critical part as well as they would if you'd just given it to them more directly.

Hirsch recommends a more direct approach: Describe what's happening, explain why it's a problem, then prompt the person for a solution. "When delivered this way," Hirsch explains, "it puts people at ease, it takes them off the defensive. It is clear, it is concise, it's locating the problem, it's looking for solutions together. People don't want a praise sandwich. People want the truth."

This approach could work with academic situations or classroom management problems: If you're dealing with a student who is disrupting class, describe the behavior you're seeing, explain why it's a problem, then ask the student for ideas on how to solve it. It sounds really simple, but if what you're doing right now isn't giving you the results you want, it's worth a try.

It has IMPACT.

One of the reasons people don't make progress after receiving feedback is that they don't necessarily know what to do with it. "If you want feedback to make an impact," Hirsch notes, "you have to put it in terms that people can operationalize." In his book, he cites studies showing that regular feedback doesn't typically result in a transfer of new skills or habits, but when that feedback is combined with coaching, the transfer skyrockets to 95 percent.

So if a student regularly forgets to bring materials to class, rather than simply telling him to change, help him make a specific plan for improvement. Ideally, that plan should have lots of small steps to make it achievable, and the student should take the lead in developing that plan.

It REFINES group dynamics.

"Feedback is a team sport," Hirsch says. "It is not just something that happens one to one. It happens in groups and across and within organizations. And when we dump that command and control nature of traditional feedback, we make room for something much more collaborative and shared."

So rather than give feedback in a top-down, hierarchical model, open up more pathways for people to get feedback from their peers, even those whose jobs might on the surface have little in common with our own. In his book, Hirsch borrows a term from management circles known as "creative abrasion," which is what happens when people with opposing views work on the same task together. Although it can result in more conflict, the contributions from different points of view usually produce a higher-quality product in the end.

This idea can play out in a lot of educational settings: Instead of just having our department head observe our teaching, why not get feedback from someone who teaches a completely different subject? When students go to the same peers for feedback on their work, have them seek out the opinion of someone new, or consider getting the input of a group of students from a different class or grade level entirely.

There's nothing simple or straightforward about telling people how to improve. So it's no surprise that we're still figuring it out and finding new ways to refine it. If the feedback you're giving to your students, your coworkers, and even the people at home isn't having quite the effect you intend, try shifting to a feedforward approach. Doing so can help us, as Hirsch says, stop seeing ourselves just as who we are, but who we are becoming. ♦

Learn more about Joe Hirsch on his website or visit his LinkedIn page. Teachers who read The Feedback Fix should also grab this free Discussion Guide for Teachers to help apply the book's principles to your own work.

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The Pygmalion Effect is a powerful secret weapon. Without even realizing it, we can nudge others towards success. In this article, discover how expectations can influence performance for better or worse.
How Expectations Influence Performance

Many people believe that their pets or children are of unusual intelligence or can understand everything they say. Some people have stories of abnormal feats. In the late 19th century, one man claimed that about his horse and appeared to have evidence. William Von Osten was a teacher and horse trainer. He believed that animals could learn to read or count. Von Osten's initial attempts with dogs and a bear were unsuccessful, but when he began working with an unusual horse, he changed our understanding of psychology. Known as Clever Hans, the animal could answer questions, with 90% accuracy, by tapping his hoof. He could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and tell the time and the date.

Clever Hans could also read and understand questions written or asked in German. Crowds flocked to see the horse, and the scientific community soon grew interested. Researchers studied the horse, looking for signs of trickery. Yet they found none. The horse could answer questions asked by anyone, even if Von Osten was absent. This indicated that no signaling was at play. For a while, the world believed the horse was truly clever.

Then psychologist Oskar Pfungst turned his attention to Clever Hans. Assisted by a team of researchers, he uncovered two anomalies. When blinkered or behind a screen, the horse could not answer questions. Likewise, he could respond only if the questioner knew the answer. From these observations, Pfungst deduced that Clever Hans was not making any mental calculations. Nor did he understand numbers or language in the human sense. Although Von Osten had intended no trickery, the act was false.

Instead, Clever Hans had learned to detect subtle, yet consistent nonverbal cues. When someone asked a question, Clever Hans responded to their body language with a degree of accuracy many poker players would envy. For example, when someone asked Clever Hans to make a calculation, he would begin tapping his hoof. Once he reached the correct answer, the questioner would show involuntary signs. Pfungst found that many people tilted their head at this point. Clever Hans would recognize this behavior and stop. When blinkered or when the questioner did not know the answer, the horse didn't have a clue. When he couldn't see the cues, he had no answer.

The Pygmalion Effect

Von Osten died in 1909 and Clever Hans disappeared from record. But his legacy lives on in a particular branch of psychology.

The case of Clever Hans is of less interest than the research it went on to provoke. Psychologists working in the decades following began to study how the expectations of others affect us. If someone expected Clever Hans to answer a question and ensured that he knew it, could the same thing occur elsewhere?

Could we be, at times, responding to subtle cues? Decades of research have provided consistent, robust evidence that the answer is yes. It comes down to the concepts of the self-fulfilling prophecy and the Pygmalion effect.

The Pygmalion effect is a psychological phenomenon wherein high expectations lead to improved performance in a given area. Its name comes from the story of Pygmalion, a mythical Greek sculptor. Pygmalion carved a statue of a woman and then became enamored with it. Unable to love a human, Pygmalion appealed to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. She took pity and brought the statue to life. The couple married and went on to have a daughter, Paphos.

False Beliefs Come True Over Time

In the same way Pygmalion's fixation on the statue brought it to life, our focus on a belief or assumption can do the same. The flipside is the Golem effect, wherein low expectations lead to decreased performance. Both effects come under the category of self-fulfilling prophecies. Whether the expectation comes from us or others, the effect manifests in the same way.

The Pygmalion effect has profound ramifications in schools and organizations and with regard to social class and stereotypes. By some estimations, it is the result of our brains' poorly distinguishing between perception and expectation. Although many people purport to want to prove their critics wrong, we often merely end up proving our supporters right.

Understanding the Pygmalion effect is a powerful way to positively affect those around us, from our children and friends to employees and leaders. If we don't take into account the ramifications of our expectations, we may miss out on the dramatic benefits of holding high standards.

The concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy is attributed to sociologist Robert K. Merton. In 1948, Merton published the first paper on the topic. In it, he described the phenomenon as a false belief that becomes true over time. Once this occurs, it creates a feedback loop. We assume we were always correct because it seems so in hindsight. Merton described a self-fulfilling prophecy as self-hypnosis through our own propaganda.

As with many psychological concepts, people had a vague awareness of its existence long before research confirmed anything. Renowned orator and theologian Jacques Benigne Bossuet declared in the 17th century that "The greatest weakness of all weaknesses is to fear too much to appear weak."

Even Sigmund Freud was aware of self-fulfilling prophecies. In A Childhood Memory of Goethe, Freud wrote: "If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success with it."

The IQ of Students

Research by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson examined the influence of teachers' expectations on students' performance. Their subsequent paper is one of the most cited and discussed psychological studies ever conducted.

Rosenthal and Jacobson began by testing the IQ of elementary school students. Teachers were told that the IQ test showed around one-fifth of their students to be unusually intelligent. For ethical reasons, they did not label an alternate group as unintelligent and instead used unlabeled classmates as the control group. It will doubtless come as no surprise that the "gifted" students were chosen at random. They should not have had a significant statistical advantage over their peers. As the study period ended, all students had their IQs retested. Both groups showed an improvement. Yet those who were described as intelligent experienced much greater gains in their IQ points. Rosenthal and Jacobson attributed this result to the Pygmalion effect. Teachers paid more attention to "gifted" students, offering more support and encouragement than they would otherwise. Picked at random, those children ended up excelling. Sadly, no follow-up studies were ever conducted, so we do not know the long-term impact on the children involved.

Prior to studying the effect on children, Rosenthal performed preliminary research on animals. Students were given rats from two groups, one described as "maze dull" and the other as "maze bright." Researchers claimed that the former group could not learn to properly negotiate a maze, but the latter could with ease. As you might expect, the groups of rats were the same. Like the gifted and nongifted children, they were chosen at random. Yet by the time the study finished, the "maze-bright" rats appeared to have learned faster. The students considered them tamer and more pleasant to work with than the "maze-dull" rats.

In general, authority figures have the power to influence how the people subordinate to them behave by holding high expectations. Whether consciously or not, leaders facilitate changes in behavior, such as by giving people more responsibility or setting stretch goals. Like the subtle cues that allowed Clever Hans to make calculations, these small changes in treatment can promote learning and growth. If a leader thinks an employee is competent, they will treat them as such. The employee then gets more opportunities to develop their competence, and their performance improves in a positive feedback loop. This works both ways. When we expect an authority figure to be competent or successful, we tend to be attentive and supportive. In the process, we bolster their performance, too. Students who act interested in lectures create interesting lecturers.

In Pygmalion in Management, J. Sterling Livingston writes,

Some managers always treat their subordinates in a way that leads to superior performance. But most ... unintentionally treat their subordinates in a way that leads to lower performance than they are capable of achieving. The way managers treat their subordinates is subtly influenced by what they expect of them. If manager's expectations are high, productivity is likely to be excellent. If their expectations are low, productivity is likely to be poor. It is as though there were a law that caused subordinates' performance to rise or fall to meet managers' expectations.

The Pygmalion effect shows us that our reality is negotiable and can be manipulated by others - on purpose or by accident. What we achieve, how we think, how we act, and how we perceive our capabilities can be influenced by the expectations of those around us. Those expectations may be the result of biased or irrational thinking, but they have the power to affect us and change what happens. While cognitive biases distort only what we perceive, self-fulfilling prophecies alter what happens.

Of course, the Pygmalion effect works only when we are physically capable of achieving what is expected of us. After Rosenthal and Jacobson published their initial research, many people were entranced by the implication that we are all capable of more than we think. Although that can be true, we have no indication that any of us can do anything if someone believes we can. Instead, the Pygmalion effect seems to involve us leveraging our full capabilities and avoiding the obstacles created by low expectations.

Clever Hans truly was an intelligent horse, but he was smart because he could read almost imperceptible nonverbal cues, not because he could do math. So, he did have unusual capabilities, as shown by the fact that few other animals have done what he did.

We can't do anything just because someone expects us to. Overly high expectations can also be stressful. When someone sets the bar too high, we can get discouraged and not even bother trying. Stretch goals and high expectations are beneficial, up to the point of diminishing returns. Research by McClelland and Atkinson indicates that the Pygmalion effect drops off if we see our chance of success as being less than 50%. If an endeavor seems either certain or completely uncertain, the Pygmalion effect does not hold. When we are stretched but confident, high expectations can help us achieve more.

Check Your Assumptions

In Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: A Practical Guide to Its Use in Education, Robert T. Tauber describes an exercise in which people are asked to list their assumptions about people with certain descriptions. These included a cheerleader, "a minority woman with four kids at the market using food stamps," and a "person standing outside smoking on a cold February day." An anonymous survey of undergraduate students revealed mostly negative assumptions. Tauber asks the reader to consider how being exposed to these types of assumptions might affect someone's day-to-day life.

The expectations people have of us affect us in countless subtle ways each day. Although we rarely notice it (unless we are on the receiving end of overt racism, sexism, and other forms of bias), those expectations dictate the opportunities we are offered, how we are spoken to, and the praise and criticism we receive. Individually, these knocks and nudges have minimal impact. In the long run, they might dictate whether we succeed or fail or fall somewhere on the spectrum in between.

The important point to note about the Pygmalion effect is that it creates a literal change in what occurs. There is nothing mystical about the effect. When we expect someone to perform well in any capacity, we treat them in a different way. Teachers tend to show more positive body language towards students they expect to be gifted. They may teach them more challenging material, offer more chances to ask questions, and provide personalized feedback. As Carl Sagan declared, "The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps."

A perfect illustration is the case of James Sweeney and George Johnson, as described in Pygmalion in Management. Sweeney was a teacher at Tulane University, where Johnson worked as a porter. Aware of the Pygmalion effect, Sweeney had a hunch that he could teach anyone to be a competent computer operator. He began his experiment, offering Johnson lessons each afternoon. Other university staff were dubious, especially as Johnson appeared to have a low IQ. But the Pygmalion effect won out and the former janitor eventually became responsible for training new computer operators.

The Pygmalion effect is a powerful secret weapon. Who wouldn't want to help their children get smarter, help employees and leaders be more competent, and generally push others to do well? That's possible if we raise our standards and see others in the best possible light. It is not necessary to actively attempt to intervene. Without even realizing it, we can nudge others towards success. If that sounds too good to be true, remember that the effect holds up for everything from rats to CEOs.
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The Pygmalion Effect: Proving Them Right

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The Pygmalion Effect is a powerful secret weapon. Without even realizing it, we can nudge others towards success. In this article, discover how expectations can influence performance for better or worse. Many people believe that their pets or children are of unusual intelligence or can understand everything they say.