16 years of writing on feedback and instructional leadership.
Browse every post below, or filter by topic to find what's relevant to your team right now.
Better Evidence, Better Feedback: From Guesswork to Growth
Vague feedback like "increase rigor" leaves teachers guessing. Three deliberate moves for planning evidence collection that actually builds credibility and growth.
In Gusty Times: How School Leaders Stay Steady and Lead Forward
Four leadership moves for navigating uncertainty — blocking the wind, reading it, catching it, and finding the eye of the storm — with summer and back-to-school actions for each.
We Dare You: Make 3 Shifts to Feedback for Learning
Three research-backed shifts districts can make to move observation and feedback systems from compliance to authentic growth.
Two Truths and a Lie: Let's Break the Ice of Educator Evaluation
A decade of Race to the Top evaluation policy has had little measurable impact on teacher performance. Here's what the research says actually moves the needle.
Recharge and Charge Ahead: What's Your Summer Plan?
A summer reading roundup: a year of blog posts on impact, adult SEL, and professional learning design, organized for poolside reflection.
What's Cookin' for Student Success?
A five-circle graphic synthesizing Wallace Foundation and Learning Policy Institute research into a single tool for planning leadership development.
Spring Forward, Forward March: Seeds and Steps Have an Impact
Principals rarely see their own impact in real time. Wallace Foundation research plus coaching conversations reveal the small steps that are already working.
Creating Moments to Create Connection
What the 2021 inauguration can teach us about building student connectedness: clear vision, purposeful planning, and moments that appeal to our humanness.
Lighting the Way: Creating Anywhere, Anytime Learning
Ten recommendations from CT schools for building peer collaboration, feedback, and anytime-anywhere professional learning.
Finding Balance: Responding to How We Really Are
Three strategies for collecting information that actually tells you how staff are doing — and using it to build trust, community, and collective efficacy.
Fair Winds and Following Seas: Feedback for Stress, Feedback for Efficacy
Teacher self-efficacy and stress are linked. Three ways growth-focused feedback can become a lifeline for educators navigating a tumultuous year.
Linking Learning & SEL: Make Connections to Make Meaning
Social-emotional learning and academic learning aren't separate tracks. Three ways to help teachers make connections instead of treating SEL as one more silo.
Oh! The Places We are Trying to Go!
Practical moves for planning reopening: process, prioritize, and align feedback cycles and professional learning to the barriers standing between students and equitable, rigorous learning.
Readying for Reopening: 21 R's for Summer Planning
Three buckets to fill this summer — spirit, knowledge, and action — with concrete R's for planning a reopening shaped by equity and self-care.
You Are An Ironman: Finish Strong!
As a strange school year nears its finish line, ideas for finishing strong with quick, learner-focused feedback delivered verbally, in writing, and on video — plus concrete steps for summer planning.
The Times They Are A Changin'
Rainbows, Twitter finds, and lessons on the psychology of change frame a look at what lies beyond acceptance — and how educators can deepen self-reflection to move forward together.
Watch For Falling Apples
A raw reflection from the first week of the pandemic shutdown on grief, adaptation, and finding growth in sudden, necessary change.
Making Impact Visible with Learner-Focused Feedback
How schools can build a culture of observation and feedback that helps teachers see their true impact on learners, with a 6-step framework for systems-level planning.
Resolve to Keep Your Resolutions!
A New Year's roundup of reader favorites on finding time to lead, shared leadership, and building collective efficacy — resolutions worth keeping past January.
Feedback That Feeds Forward: A Gift that Keeps on Giving
A holiday-season case study in feedback strategy — how an observer moves a teacher's 'use a Do Now' next step from vague advice to a bite-sized, actionable gift that keeps on giving.
What if Every Day Were Thanksgiving?
Why the 'praise sandwich' backfires, and how learner-focused, strengths-based feedback helps teachers and leaders feel valued and see their impact every day, not just on Thanksgiving.
What Are You Cultivating This Season?
A harvest-season metaphor for evidence collection — practical solutions for observers who feel unsure what to collect or overwhelmed by how much there is to gather in a classroom visit.
Running to Stand Still or Finding the Time to Lead?
Instructional leaders rarely lack the will to get into classrooms — they lack the time. Strategies for going slow, staying steady, remaining deliberate, and sprinting when it counts.
Change Your Disposition, Change Your Outcomes
Brené Brown's take on feedback and vulnerability, paired with the six Feedback Dispositions that shape how observers and teachers engage with each other.
Taking the Plunge with Learners
A poolside swim lesson becomes a lens for understanding mild pressure, high expectations, and how observers can push learners just far enough to grow.
When All Things Become Visible
A lesson in seaglunking on the shores of Lake Michigan becomes a metaphor for how clear expectations, feedback, and practice build assessment-capable learners.
It's Like Riding a Bike...But, Together
A Chicago party bike becomes an unlikely metaphor for collective teacher efficacy, and what it takes for leaders and teachers to move toward shared goals together.
Are You Smarter Than a 6th Grader?
Sixth graders giving peer feedback during a classroom debate reveal what high-quality, rubric-aligned feedback should look and sound like for adults, too.
Birds of a Feather Flock Together
What Canadian geese can teach instructional leaders about shared responsibility, clear communication, and flying — and leading — together.
Go From Ordinary to Extraordinary
A New Fairfield Middle School leadership team goes beyond policy requirements with 96 classroom walkthroughs — a look at what it takes to lead beyond the minimum.
Big Data and Educator Effectiveness and Accountability
Reflections from a Tianjin University forum on big data — and what advances in information technology could mean for how we collect and analyze evidence of student learning.
A Message to PEAC: TEVAL Should Promote Reflection
A response to Connecticut's PEAC on rebalancing educator evaluation weighting — shifting emphasis from outcome scores toward practice, evidence, and reflection.
Connecting Teacher Action with Student Outcomes
A proposal for redesigning Student Learning Objectives so they measure not just whether students grew, but which teacher practices drove that growth.
A Message to Disconnect in Order to Connect
Two unplanned moments of disconnection — a WiFi-free flight and a dead phone mid-run — offer a lesson for conference-goers about slowing down to notice more.
Two CT Districts Heading to Vancouver
West Hartford and Canton Public Schools head to the Learning Forward Conference to share how they shifted teacher evaluation from an inspection model to a growth model.
CT Court Decision Can Help Reshape Educator Practice
A landmark CT court ruling on teacher evaluation opens the door to fix three core flaws in how evaluator capacity, student outcomes, and learning itself are defined.
Gratitude For Five Years-Here's to Five More
Marking five years in business, a reflection on the partnerships with organizations, clients, and consultants that made the milestone possible.
Making Video-Based Calibration Matter
Why simple agreement-scoring against calibration videos falls short, and how pairing video-based calibration with coaching builds real evaluator capacity.
Personalized Learning for All
If personalized, competency-based learning is the right approach for students, why do we abandon those same principles when designing professional learning for the adults in our schools?
Claim, Connect, Action: Making Teacher Feedback Effective
A simple three-part model — Claim, Connect, Action — helps evaluators turn observation notes into feedback that actually moves every teacher's practice forward.
Accuracy will Never be Enough in Educator Evaluation
Teachers want quality feedback, not just accurate ratings. A four-step cycle for building the evaluator capacity that makes feedback for growth possible.
Making Sense of Educator Evaluation
Educator evaluation stops feeling like disconnected compliance events once districts anchor it in a real Cycle of Planning and Performance Improvement.
Feedback on Teacher Performance is Not an Event
Ask leaders about supervision and they describe relationships and coaching. Ask about evaluation and they list events. Closing that gap is where quality feedback lives.
Student Self-Assessment: Building Growth Minded Learners
Lessons from a yoga mat on modeling, criteria, and feedback — and why sharing a rubric isn't enough to help students truly self-assess their own mastery.
Goals 2016: Shout them from the rooftops
A novice runner's lesson in accountability: goals we share publicly, even with strangers at a 5K, pull more effort out of us than the ones we keep to ourselves.
The Puzzle Pieces Fit
How one high school connected the dots between an accreditation self-study and a new teacher evaluation process, using shared rubrics to de-pressurize competing initiatives.
The Right Conversation
A tense parent information night on Common Core becomes a case for having the right conversation with teachers, students, and parents about why instructional practice needs to shift.
Enriching Teacher Evaluation Through Artifacts and Collegial Conversation
Observation is only one modality of evidence for teacher evaluation — a case for pairing it with artifact review and collegial conversation to build a fuller, more trusting picture of practice.
Student Exploration Nurtures Student Engagement
A student teacher's experiment leaving science materials out for kids to discover on their own shows how curiosity-driven exploration can spark deeper engagement than direct instruction.
Authentic Teacher Observation Supports Professional Learning
Why scripting a lesson for a defensible evaluation record misses the point of observation — and how calibration tools and live classroom practice can refocus reviews on genuine professional growth.
Authentic Learning for 21st Century Skills
A visit to a school-within-a-school program shows what authentic, student-directed learning looks like when students design, prototype, and pitch real products to solve real-world problems.
It's About "Time" Gov. Malloy
Gov. Malloy's call to slow down teacher evaluation and Common Core rollout is a chance to argue for what education reform actually needs most: time to plan, communicate, and build trust.
Developing Human Capital with Purpose
A conversation with an aspiring principal reinforces the idea from Daniel Pink's Drive: when passionate people get autonomy to design their own path toward mastery and purpose, they reach better outcomes.
A Call For Community in Teacher Evaluation
Charlotte Danielson's reminder that teaching is one of the most complex professions raises a hard question: can one principal really evaluate it alone, or does the work call for community?
Leadership for the New Century
Addressing a new cohort of education policy fellows, a case for why 21st century leadership hinges on collaboration, a willingness to release control, and the courage to nurture the first followers of change.
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