Why Great Feedback Starts With the One Move That Changes What Happens Next
Uncorking leadership, learning, and the conversations that move schools forward.
Two weeks ago, we talked about The Coaching Echo: coach actions should change teacher actions, and teacher actions should change student outcomes.
Last week, my rolling desk and I argued that leaders have to get close enough to the work to actually know what is happening.
Which means I can no longer avoid the topic I promised you.
Feedback.
Education loves feedback.
We have feedback forms. Observation feedback. Coaching feedback. Principal feedback. Survey feedback. Written feedback. Verbal feedback. Feedback on the feedback.
We are a highly feedbacked profession.
And yet sometimes, after all that feedback…
Tuesday looks exactly like Monday.
That’s a problem.
Because the purpose of feedback isn’t to deliver feedback.
The purpose of feedback is to change what happens next.
Feedback Is Not a Receipt
Somewhere along the way, many organizations turned feedback into proof that leadership occurred.
Observation completed. ✓ Feedback delivered. ✓ Action step entered. ✓ Follow-up scheduled. ✓
Look at us leading.
Except the teacher is still doing the exact same thing three weeks later.
We have confused giving feedback with developing people.
Those aren’t the same thing.
John Hattie and Helen Timperley’s influential 2007 review of feedback research, published in Review of Educational Research, argues that effective feedback helps answer three questions:
- Where am I going?
- How am I going?
- Where to next?
That third question matters.
Feedback should point toward an action.
Not simply:
“Here is what I noticed.”
But:
“Here is what you should do differently next time — and here’s how we’ll know whether it worked.”
That is a much higher bar.
More Feedback Is Not Better Feedback
This may be unpopular in a profession that has invested considerable money in walkthrough forms.
But here goes:
More feedback is not necessarily better.
In fact, feedback can be ineffective — and sometimes even counterproductive — depending on what it focuses on and how it is delivered.
Hattie and Timperley identified four distinct levels at which feedback operates: the task, the process, self-regulation, and the self as a person. Feedback connected to the first three can be powerful. Feedback aimed primarily at the person — “You’re such a great teacher!” or its considerably less pleasant cousin — often does much less to improve performance. The level matters as much as the content.
Then there’s cognitive load.
Imagine I observe a teacher and leave these notes:
Tighten directions. Increase student discourse. Improve pacing. Check for understanding more frequently. Strengthen questioning. Narrate positive behavior. Monitor independent practice. Increase rigor. Use exemplars. Circulate more strategically.
Technically, I may be right about all ten.
I have also just handed someone the instructional equivalent of:
“Be better at teaching.”
Good luck tomorrow!
A laundry list is not an action step.
Find the Domino
This is where great coaching gets harder.
Your job isn’t to identify everything that could improve.
Your job is to identify the thing that, if improved, is most likely to move the rest.
The domino.
Paul Bambrick-Santoyo’s Leverage Leadership 2.0 has long emphasized bite-sized, observable action steps: identify the highest-leverage next move, practice it, and follow up quickly. The logic is straightforward — development requires focus, and focus requires choosing.
Suppose I watch a teacher whose students aren’t producing strong written responses.
I could give feedback on the writing.
But because I was close enough to the work — remember the rolling desk? — I notice something happening earlier.
During independent work, the teacher circulates primarily to monitor compliance.
“You working?” “Keep going.” “Make sure you answer number three.”
The teacher is lapping.
But the laps aren’t gathering information about student thinking.
Now we’ve found something useful.
The feedback isn’t:
“Students need stronger written responses.”
The teacher already knows that.
It might be:
“During tomorrow’s target task, use your first lap to check one specific success criterion in every student’s response. Sort what you see into got-it/not-yet, then use that evidence to decide your show call.”
Now we have something we can practice.
Something we can see.
Something we can measure.
And most importantly, something the teacher can do tomorrow.
If They Can’t Practice It, You Probably Haven’t Finished Coaching It
One of my favorite tests for an action step is simple:
Can we practice this right now?
If the answer is no, there’s a decent chance the feedback is still too vague.
“Increase rigor.” Okay. Show me.
“Improve classroom culture.” Great. What will I hear you say at 9:07 tomorrow morning?
“Ask stronger questions.” Which question? At what point in tomorrow’s lesson? What student response are you anticipating? What will you say if students don’t get there?
Practice forces clarity.
Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi make this case precisely in Practice Perfect: knowing what to do is not the same as being able to execute it fluently when the moment arrives. They argue that most professional development stops at understanding, which is exactly one step short of performance. That distinction matters enormously in schools.
Teaching happens fast.
A teacher doesn’t have fifteen minutes during a lesson to remember the seven bullets from your observation email, reread the rubric, consult a framework, and ponder your thoughtful coaching question.
Thirty students are sitting there.
Right now.
The move has to be usable.
So practice it.
You be the student.
Let the teacher try.
Reset.
Try again.
Make it awkward in the coaching meeting so it can be smooth in the classroom.
Feedback Without Follow-Up Is Just a Suggestion
Here’s where feedback systems often quietly fall apart.
Monday: “Great conversation. Here’s your action step.”
Teacher leaves energized. Coach feels productive. Everyone updates the tracker.
Then…
Tuesday happens. Wednesday happens. A fire drill happens. Someone needs coverage. Thursday becomes field-trip day. Friday is apparently Pajama Day, which no one remembered until 7:43 a.m.
And Monday arrives again.
“So, what should we work on this week?”
Wait.
Did the last thing work?
This is where The Coaching Echo comes back.
Feedback should create a tiny improvement cycle:
See it → Name it → Practice it → Try it → See it again → Measure the effect
Not:
See it → Name twelve things → Send email → Never speak of it again
Feedback becomes development when someone returns to see whether practice changed.
That return communicates something important:
What we discussed mattered enough for me to come back.
Don’t Confuse Feedback With Judgment
There is another reason follow-up matters.
If leaders mostly enter classrooms to evaluate, teachers learn something very quickly:
Leadership presence = judgment.
That’s not particularly conducive to learning.
Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety helps explain why. Her work, developed across decades of organizational studies and synthesized in The Fearless Organization, demonstrates that learning requires people to take interpersonal risks: admitting uncertainty, asking for help, trying something new, and occasionally doing it badly before they do it well.
That’s true for students.
It’s also true for adults.
A strong coaching culture doesn’t remove accountability.
It makes improvement normal.
There is a difference between:
“I caught you doing this wrong.”
and
“We said we’d work on this. Let’s see how it’s going.”
Same standard.
Very different learning environment.
The goal is not to make feedback comfortable.
Sometimes good feedback is uncomfortable.
The goal is to make feedback useful, actionable, and trustworthy.
Your Feedback Should Have an Expiration Date
Here’s one more Edutipsy rule:
Feedback should have an expiration date.
If I give you an action step in September and we’re still discussing the exact same action step in December, one of three things is probably true:
The action step was wrong. The coaching wasn’t strong enough. Or we’ve been admiring the problem instead of solving it.
Remember our 10-day rule from The Coaching Echo.
Pick something small enough to act on now. Define what improvement should look like. Practice it. Go see it. Look at the evidence.
Then decide:
Did it work? If yes, what’s the next domino? If no, why not?
That is coaching.
Not an endless accumulation of feedback.
A cycle of increasingly better practice.
Final Sip
Before your next feedback conversation, resist the temptation to demonstrate everything you noticed.
Nobody gets a medal for the longest observation notes.
Instead, ask yourself:
What is the one change in adult practice most likely to improve the student experience?
Then make it small enough to practice. Clear enough to observe. Important enough to follow up on. And measurable enough that both of you can tell whether it worked.
Because your feedback isn’t the point.
What happens Tuesday is the point.
The stronger question isn’t:
“Did I give good feedback?”
It’s:
“What changed because I gave it?”
That’s the feedback echo.
And if the answer is nothing?
Don’t write a longer email.
Pull up a chair.
Or, in my case, roll up the desk.
We’ve got some coaching to do. Here is a one-pager to accompany this blog. Take action.
Sip Wisdom: Recommended Reading
Hattie, John & Helen Timperley. “The Power of Feedback.” Review of Educational Research, Vol. 77, No. 1 (2007).
This foundational review is worth reading beyond the often-quoted effect-size conversations about feedback. Hattie and Timperley distinguish between feedback focused on the task, the process, self-regulation, and the person — and show why simply giving more feedback does not guarantee better learning. Their three questions — Where am I going? How am I going? Where to next? — are a useful test for any coaching conversation.
Bambrick-Santoyo, Paul. Leverage Leadership 2.0: A Practical Guide to Building Exceptional Schools. Jossey-Bass, 2018.
The observation and feedback work here reinforces the importance of narrow, high-leverage action steps, practice, and repeated follow-up. Pair this with The Coaching Echo: the action step isn’t complete because the coach delivered it. It is complete when adult practice changes in a way that improves student learning.
Lemov, Doug, Erica Woolway & Katie Yezzi. Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better. Jossey-Bass, 2012.
A useful reminder that understanding an idea and executing it fluently are different things. If we expect teachers and leaders to perform differently in complex, fast-moving environments, our coaching should include opportunities to rehearse the actual moves — not simply discuss them.
Edmondson, Amy C. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley, 2018.
Edmondson’s work is especially relevant for leaders trying to build cultures where feedback leads to learning rather than defensiveness. Psychological safety does not mean lowering expectations; it creates conditions where adults can acknowledge mistakes, ask for help, experiment, and improve while remaining accountable for results.
One More Sip
For an especially useful research-based companion, look up Kluger & DeNisi’s “The Effects of Feedback Interventions on Performance,” published in Psychological Bulletin in 1996. Their meta-analysis produced an important finding for anyone who believes feedback is automatically beneficial: although feedback interventions improved performance on average, more than one-third actually decreased performance.
In other words:
The question was never whether we gave feedback.
The question is whether we gave the right feedback, about the right thing, in a way that helped someone get better.