EPISODE #35

You're listening to the School Leadership Reimagined Podcast, episode number thirty five.

Welcome to the School Leadership Reimagined podcast...

where we rethink what's possible to transform your school. If you're tired of settling for small wins and incremental improvement, then stay tuned to discover powerful and practical strategies for getting every teacher in your school moving towards excellence. Now, here's your host, Robyn Jackson.

Hey Builders!

Welcome to another episode of School Leadership Reimagined. I'm your host Robyn Jackson. And today we're in the second episode of a four episode arc about the four disciplines of buildership.

Now the reason we're diving deep into the four disciplines of buildership is that if you really, really, really want to stop putting out fires, stop, you know, fixing things that are broken in your school and actually build a stronger school, you need to double down on establishing your core values, vision, and mission. But that's only the first part. The second part and the most important part is you have to sustain that work over time. And the only way that you can do that is through the four disciplines of buildership. And those are feedback, support, accountability and culture. And the thing is the four disciplines of buildership: if you practice them and you treat them like disciplines there is no challenge that you face in your school that can't be solved by one of those four things.

So over the next four episodes, and today we're in episode two, I'm going to be explaining why each discipline is so important. I'll tell you what it is. I'll tell you how you can use that discipline to solve some of the biggest challenges and to also lay the foundation for a better school because it's not just about fixing the school that you have, it's about building a better school. And the only way that you can do that is through religiously practicing these four disciplines.

Now last time we talked, we talked about the discipline of culture and if you missed that episode then you really need to go back and listen to it. It's episode 34 and you can just go to schoolleadershipreimagined.com/episode34 no space in between. And that's where I talk about this idea that culture will eat strategy for breakfast.

So if you want to learn more about that, learn why culture is so important and then learn the one thing that you really need to do if you want to sustain control over your culture and build a healthy school culture. So that's in episode 34.

Today is part two of this series and today we're going to talk about feedback. 

And now a lot of people think they already understand feedback. But tell me if this is how feedback works in your school. If you're a school administrator, you do your best to try to get into classrooms. You do walkthroughs. A lot of times you required to do walkthroughs. He tried to get into, you know, x number of classrooms.

Each week you pop in the classroom, you have a little checklist, you write a little note down the it to the teacher. The teacher either ignores it or sees your note and freaks out and says, you know, what are you doing? How could you say that about my classroom? Or that you, you go in and you give teachers feedback week after week, month after month and nothing changes. And then you have a couple of teachers who are in their evaluation year. And so you set up more formal observations. You go in, you do your scripting, you do your writeup, you have the post observation conference. It's often awful.

There's a lot of push back or hurt feelings or blank stares. And the it, it feels like you're going through this fruitless exercise. I call it the feedback dance where you say, so how do you think the lesson went? And the teacher says why they could went great and you're looking at the teacher and you're like, really? You thought that was great? Or, or, or there's some sort of, you know, kind of fake conversation, fake reflection and you're trying to ask the right questions, trying to get teachers to truly reflect. And the teachers are, you know, kind of tightening up and they're looking at your feedback is you're just kind of going through the motions of your evaluation instrument and you fill out the instrument. It's the end of the year. You turn it in, you spend nights and weekends, you know, kind of compiling all this paperwork and filling out these forms and you turn it all in and then the cycle repeats itself next year.

Very rarely do you see teachers actually acting on your feedback and getting better. 

And that's the problem with the way that we were traditionally taught to do feedback. That's how leadership teaches you how to do feedback. That's how leaders do it. And, and really good leaders are on top of their feedback. They have schedules, they, they get into classrooms, they have their checklist, they fill them out, they do all of that and nothing changes or very little changes.

So what builders do, it's builders use something different. Builders give people feedback that actually improves practice and consistently improves practice. In fact, I don't even like saying the word improve because improve doesn't capture it. It, it takes a teacher it, it targets the, the, the, where the teacher needs to work on right now. And it helps that teacher build capacity. And I guess that's a difference. Leaders kind of help teachers improve. Maybe builders build capacity for teachers and the idea that builders have when they go on to give feedback, it's that every teacher is going to eventually become a master teacher. And so they're trying to figure out what is the feedback that I can give this teacher right now that's going to build that teacher's capacity so that that teacher can become a master teacher.

So today we're going to talk about what does that kind of feedback look like. What does the power of that kind of feedback? We're going to talk about some of the mistakes that you may be unintentionally making right now that you think you're doing it to kind of bring a help the teacher become more reflective, but in actuality that feedback is shutting down reflection. So we're going to talk about three big mistakes that people make that you may be making two. And I'm going to tell you why their mistakes and what you can be doing differently. And then we're going to talk about the way that builders give feedback and how that kind of feedback actually builds teacher's capacity. How that kind of feedback really does overcome a lot of pushback and hurt feelings and blank stares. And so we're going to be talking about one thing, feedback.

It's something that we teach at Builder's lab and also do it in other workshops, but

It's really a revolutionary way of giving people feedback 

that actually builds their capacity instead of just looking at little, teeny, tiny incremental improvements or, you know, unfortunately no improvements at all. And speaking of builder's lab and, and what we do at builder's lab with feedback, 

I want to just remind you that we have a couple of builders labs coming up this summer. The first one is builder's lab one and it's happening June 24 through 26 and it's in Palm Springs, California. So if you're a principal or assistant principal or a district leader, this is a great builder's lab for you.

Now, if you're an instructional coach, well you kind of always get the short end of the stick when it comes to training. There isn't a lot of good training for instructional coaches and we believe that's wrong. We believe that instructional coaches are one of the most crucial critical roles that someone can play in a school. And so you need training that's designed for you.

So we've created builder's lab, the coaches edition specifically to address the unique challenges that you face as an instructional coach. And that's happening this summer in Washington DC. We'll right outside of Washington DC. It's in Arlington, Virginia and it's July 15 through 17 that if you want to get tickets to both or either of those events, you can go to mindstepsinc.com/builders-lab. That's mindstepsinc.com/builders-lab.

Okay. Now let's get into feedback.

Let's start out by talking about the way that you were probably trained on how to give feedback and, and why that training fails you so much. 

So the first reason that the first thing that often happens or the way that we were trained to give feedback is we were trained to sit down and to start out the conversation with a question.

And usually that question is something like, you know, so how do you think the lesson went today? Some version of that or if you don't start out with that question, we were trained that you need to ask the right question during the feedback conversation in order to make the other person more reflective. But here's what's wrong with that.

First of all, if you start out with, so how do you think the class went? And the teacher tells you honestly how they think the class went. What if you disagree with that? What have you thought the class was awful and the teacher thought it was pretty good? So the moment you asked that question, you've already set yourself up to be in disagreement with a teacher. You've already set yourself up to say, Oh, you thought that was good. Oh No, honey, look, let's look at my notes. It was pretty bad. So you're, that question sets you up.

The second thing is regardless of how the teacher thought the classroom went, the reason you're having the conversation, it's because you're there to share how you thought the classroom went. So it's almost an insincere question. And a lot of teachers who were really savvy know that it's an insincere question. They know it's a setup. So they do one of two things. Either they say, you know, um, I have thought that the class went really well and they start kind of making their case for why they shouldn't be dinged on your evaluation instrument. Or if they're really, really savvy they, they start nit picking at their class and try to guess what it is you're going to ding them on. And they figure if they can say at first they'll get points for being reflective.

So the question is really useless when you're sitting down having, giving somebody feedback. They're there because they want to hear what your feedback is. So rather than making them go first, you go first, you set the pace, you talk about what you saw in the classroom and then you have helped them reflect on that. I mean this whole idea of Oh I want them to be reflective. So I'm going to ask questions. A lot of our questions that we ask are really suggestions in disguise. So we say things like, oh, so how might you have, you know, helped students be more engaged in the lesson. That's not a question you, you, you know, there, there's not a whole bunch of the teacher can say to answer that question because you've already identified the kids weren't engaged and you already have an idea of what, what the teacher could do.

So asking them that question is a setup and it feels not only insincere, inauthentic, it feels threatening because you're asking them a question and there isn't really a good answer to that question cause it's not a question to begin with. So a lot of us were given scripts or question starters, you know, how might you have, and anytime somebody starts a question with how might you have that is a suggestion in disguise. Stop it.

People can't be reflective when they feel like they're being set up. 

And a lot of our questions are really set ups. You know, what sparks true reflection, having a conversation around what actually happened in the classroom. Um, asking sincere questions. So my role around questions is this. I do not ask a question if I think I already know the answer. Think about that. The whole point of a question is I'm asking you a question because I'm interested in what you have to say next.

If I'm not interested in what the person has the state to say next. If I already know and I'm using air quotes here, if I already know the right answer, why don't I ask him the question. If we really want sincere, authentic reflection to happen in the conversation, then we need to ask sincere authentic questions. So that's the first way that we're, we're undermining our feedback. We are asking questions were leading with questions that are not sincere or not authentic.

The second way that we were trained to give feedback that that that hurts our ability to really have an authentic conversation with teachers is that we give too much feedback. So what we do is we go in and we script and we noticed this and we noticed that and this is domain one and this is domain two and this is domain three and you know we keep, we give people everything.

It's a lot of times people will ask me, you know, I'm doing a walkthrough. It can you look at my checklist and you know, I hate checklists. I'll be honest with you. And, and I didn't always do this when I was an administrator. I created an amazing checklist. And if you buy my book, the instructional leaders' guide to strategic conversations with teachers that, oh my gosh, that is a long title. But it's strategic. The shorthand is, it's about strategic conversations.

In the appendix I include a checklist. It was a checklist that I made and used when I was an administrator. But the more that I spend time in schools and the more that I spend time coaching administrators, the more I am starting to see how that checklist actually undermines sincere, authentic, powerful feedback. Because a checklist covers the gamut.

And so when you have this checklist and you're checking things off that you've seen in the classroom, here's what invariably happens. The teacher looks at the checklist and they see something, listen on the checklist that they think they did, but you didn't check it off. So now we've got an argument. Now the teacher's mad at you because you missed something and now the teacher's not going to trust your feedback because you obviously don't know what you're doing because if you knew what you were doing, you would see that I did do this thing and so now your feedback conversation is about did I do this thing or didn't I? Yes I did. No I didn't. And that's a lot of back and forth and that is not a, an environment were true. Reflection can take place.

The other thing is a lot of times instead of being fully present in the classroom, instead of paying attention and understanding how the parts work together, the checklists forces you to look at this thing, that thing, this other thing, and I feel the same with a lot of the same way about a lot of the evaluation instruments out there. They break teaching down and they, they grab these different pieces of teaching and then you've broken down teaching so much that you don't have a complete whole picture of what was happening in the classroom. I have seen a lot of master teachers violate our so called best practices and do amazing things with kids.

So when you have a checklist or you have an instrument and you're relying on that instrument, you're trying to check everything off that instrument. A lot of times it gets you so focused on quote unquote best practices are quote unquote domains and subdomains that you've lose track of what's actually happening in the classroom and then when you sit down to give that teacher feedback later on, you're so busy listing all the things that the teacher either did or didn't, the teacher has left without an overall picture of their classroom.

And let's be real.

If you give this teacher this laundry list of things that either did or did not do, what is the teacher supposed to do with that? 

How is the teacher supposed to respond? If a teacher does three things that you told them to do based on your checklist between one visit and the next, but they don't do the three most important things. They just do the three things that are easiest or most convenient, and you go back. Can you honestly say that that teacher has improved and yet you feel like you almost have to say that because they did do three out of the seven things that you asked them to do. So it's harder to really hold teachers accountable for improving when you're giving them seven, eight, 10 things that they have to work on without giving them real direction about which one should they start first, which one makes the most difference for their kids and their practice.

So it's a real set up when you try to cover everything in your evaluation. And that leads me to the third big mistake.

 The third big mistake I see a lot of people making is that they don't give a call to action that give people a lot of feedback and they're like, okay, so what are you going to do with that? And teacher says, I'm going to throw in the trash then what? Or okay, here's what you need to do. You know we got, here's your feedback, but there's not a call to action. There's not a next step for the teacher to take. And the teachers left to have to figure that on that on their own. And a lot of times what the teacher interprets from your feedback in terms of what they need to do is different from what you intended. And so there's a lot of miscommunication happening and the challenge with all three of these big mistakes is this, you are doing what you were trained to do.

You are doing what you think is the right thing. And in fact all those things are actually conspiring against you to shut down reflection to, to, to foster, push back and and hurt feelings or to be so confusing that the teacher is sitting there looking at you with a blank stare because they don't know what to do with your feedback. That's not the role of feedback. Feedback like that is never going to transform practice or your school. So we got to get away from the way that we've traditionally been taught to do feedback and we have to really focus on feedback differently. So there are three criteria for what I consider to be builder worthy feedback. So first of all, and this is true for whether you're giving feedback to teachers or whether you are or as a teacher, you're giving feedback to students. And this is true, this is, this is true regardless.

And I guess that's one of the things that builders do. Builders don't have one role for how teachers should treat students. And another rule of a, how they treat the adults, builders walk the talk. One of the things that I tell people all the time is you have to be who you want to see. So what builders do is they model the kind of feedback that they expect teachers to give to students. And so the rules apply whether or not this is feedback that you are giving to adults or if this is feedback that you're expecting teachers to give to students. The first thing is this good feedback builder, worthy feedback. Number one, it points people to the one thing that is at the root of their practice. The whole idea about one thing, feedback is that you're not giving people a laundry list of feedback because people can't process that and you can't grow from that.

What builders do is when they go into a classroom, they focus on one thing.

What is the one thing that if you fix this one thing here and if you change your practice in this one way it will, it will exponentially move your practice forward. Whenever I'm going in and giving people feedback about their practice, whether it's a, it's a teacher where I'm walking in with administrators and showing them how to give good feedback or whether I am observing an administrator and giving that an administrator feedback about how they are running their schools. I'm always looking for what is the one thing that would make all the difference because I don't have time to play and you don't have time to play either going in and telling teachers to tweak their way to improvement means and you're going to spend years and years and years of really bad practice.

But if you go into the classroom and you say, okay, I see this, I see that I see the other, but this thing here, we don't get this thing straight, then we can't move this teacher's practice. If you're not applying that kind of rigor to your feedback and your feedback is not helping teachers grow. And so I don't want teachers tweaking their practice here. I'll, you know, you should use, you know, um, different color markers on the white board instead of just the black marker because it's just more, it gets more variety. You should, you know, all of that stuff is, oh, that's cute. If it's not going to exponentially help that teacher grow that I'm not really interested. I don't have time for that because I'm trying to build a new school. I'm trying to build a better school, something bigger and better than what I could imagine or do on my own.

Now, if I'm walking in with that kind of imperative, that changes my feedback fundamentally. And it should change yours as well. So if you're looking for that kind of transformation and you're a tired of these little tiny incremental tweaks and improvements and, and you're impatient because year after year after year, you're not seeing your teachers grow, then it's probably because we're giving teachers feedback that fosters incremental improvements rather than giving feedback that fosters that kind of, you know, amazing growth that you see in a teacher's practice. Remember, leaders give teachers feedback to kind of fix, tweak, improve their practice. Builders give teachers feedback that helps that teacher grow, that builds that teacher's capacity. So the first way you build the teacher's capacity is you have to give them focused feedback. The people don't like that. People, when I tell them one thing, feedback, they were like, well, you know, I've got an instrument.

It's got all this other stuff. Well, one of the things that we teach a builder's lab is we show you how to take your instrument, how to, you know, satisfy all the demands of your feedback process that's advocated by your district and still get teachers focus on the one thing. And basically it goes like this, okay, I saw this, this, this, this and this. But here is the one thing that if you address this, if you focus on fixing this, all these other things, we'll get him, we'll, we'll start to come together as well. And if you give people feedback like that, that they walk out of there not only kind of like with a, with a deeper understanding of their practice, they walk out of that conversation with marching orders. There's a call to action. I need to work on this. And guess what else there's built in accountability because when I go back to visit your classroom, instead of giving you an overall assessment like I did the first time, now I'm looking specifically for how you're growing in that one area that we've identified as the root cause.

And when I'm looking to give you support, I'm not giving you generic support. I'm giving you support that helps you grow in that one area around the root cause. So you see how that works. When you give people one thing feedback, you can track their growth, you can give them better support, they have a clear direction about what they need to work on first and then when they address that area and they grow in that area, it also addresses all these other areas as well. So you really have to hone in on the root cause. And so one of the things we do is that we do something called micro slicing that shows you how to hone in on the root cause and five minutes of observation and people will look at me and they're like, Yup, that's crazy. You can't get to the root cause of a teacher's practice in five minutes.

It doesn't work that way. I need to spend 20 hours in the classroom and get adjusted, address everything. But that's not true.

When you are focused, you can understand a teacher's practice and observing five to seven minutes of their practice, you can get to the root cause.

And then you can look for other evidence to support that. But once you've gotten to the root cause, then you can now help that teacher. And it doesn't take 30 40 hours of observation to figure that out. Five minutes. So we teach something called micro slicing. We do it in builder's lab. Are we doing in our workshops or even when I'm doing like coaching principals, I'll take them and we'll do micro slicing live or we look at a video of instruction. But the idea is this, you have to train your eye to look for the root cause.

And once you do that and once you practice that, you get really good at that. So when you're walking in a classroom, you're not wasting time giving teachers tips and strategies that are not going to move their practice. You are focusing in on the one thing, the root cause. And when you do that, when you figure that out, then you can really help a teacher. So that's the first thing. Good feedback points people to the one thing that is at the root of their practice, the one thing they need to be focusing on. Secondly, good feedback invites people to do things differently. I don't want tweaks, I don't want adjustments. I want to give people feedback that invites them to do something differently. And notice that word invites because remember, bosses say goal leaders say let's go. But builders say calm. Everything that a builder does, it's invitational.

I'm not walking into your classroom and taking over your practice and telling you, you know you need to put kids in small groups because they're not engaged and they need more student to student talk. Because once I do that, once I tell you what to do, I am now responsible for the success or failure of your classroom. I've taken ownership over your classroom. Builders don't do that. So builders give people feedback in a way that says, here's the root cause and now let's together figure out how we address it.

You are inviting people into a conversation that's focused on helping them grow. 

Same thing with kids. If I'm mark up your paper, I used to be an English teacher. If I mark up your paper and change it and rewrite your paper, what are you supposed to do? Good feedback says, Hey, we got to work on this, and then it invites the person to be a part of that.

I'm not coming in and telling them what to do. I'm inviting them to be a part of that. We try to do that by, you know, all those carefully crafted questions that we've created and I mean if you've tried them, you know those questions often don't work under perfect circumstances. Yes, it works. It was, it's almost a gift to give somebody their, their side of the script and you read your sentence, gripped your scripted questions and then they read their side of the script, the answers that you want to get from them. That's not authentic feedback. Authentic feedback says, Hey, listen, I, I've gone in, this is what I'm seeing is a root cause. Here's why. Now let's together figure out what we do about it. And it doesn't rely on the teacher to have to figure it out on their own. You're there supporting them.

You've invited them to be a part of a conversation that really focuses on growing their practice exponentially. Not Tweaks, not little strategies and tricks and all of that. When you go back into classroom, they do it. Even if they do it perfectly, it's still not fixing the problem because you're trying to fix their practice rather than inviting them into something better. That's the difference. Most of the time when we go into feedback, we are trying to find what's wrong. What do you need to fix? So what it means is you're broken when you, that's the message you're giving to the teacher. You're broken. There's something wrong with the way that you are teaching. Builders don't do that. That's not the kind of feedback that's going to grow your people. What builders do, instead of trying to go in and fix a bad teacher or fix a mediocre teacher, what builders do is they say, hey, listen, you, I believe you're going to be a master teacher.

That's what I'm calling towards. We're building something bigger than ourselves here. And it can only work if you grow in these areas. So here's an area that that we need to grow in. Here's an area that we need to build up in your practice. So come on together. You and I, let's figure out how we do that. And if the teacher says, well, I have no idea, just tell me what to do. I'm not going to tell you what to do. But I will tell you how to, how I will help you begin to think about this differently. I will build your capacity so that from now on you will know what to do. Notice difference in that tone. Right now, a lot of our feedback conversations, how are adversarial or they have this underlying undercurrent of hostility. Nobody has time for that. We're trying to build something bigger.

When you give feedback like a builder, there's no underlying hostility. Everything's out on the table. There's no, there's, it's not an adversarial relationship because you are inviting somebody into their best selves because you believe that it exists in them. And it's amazing how it changes the game. When you approach feedback in that way, you want to achieve your goal, your vision, your mission, your core values for your school. You have to embody that in the way that you work with teachers. So if you expect teachers to believe in kids, if you expect teachers to give kids hope, if you expect teachers to find the best and every single kid, you have to do that as an adult. And it comes down to how you give people feedback. Are you giving people feedback in a way that communicates your broken, I need to fix you? Or are you giving people feedback in a way that says,

I'm an inviting you into something bigger and together we're going to build your capacity because we are building a better school.

So that's number two. One, you have to point people to the one thing that's at the root of their practice to you have to invite them to do things differently. And then three, you have to show them what will happen if they do do things differently. In other words, you're inviting people into a better, more successful version of themselves and so you've got to paint that picture. This is the thing that I think is missing for most feedback. We tell people you need more student to student talk, you're missing student engagement. There needs to be more rigor. You need to collect feedback throughout the lesson and we just assume that people will know why they need to do that and what will happen if they do that. There is nothing more demotivating than telling me to do something just because it's on a list of best practices.

We need to tell me that if I do this, if I increased student to student talk, if I increased student engagement, if I give kids better feedback, if I, if I collect information to see how well they're learning and then use it to adjust my instruction, what will happen? How will I be better? How will I enjoy my classroom more? How will my students learn better? And quite frankly, we've stopped having those conversations as educators. We read up. This is best practice because John Hattie said so, and I have nothing against John Hattie. I think he's brilliant, but I think it's been abused. I think that Charlotte Danielson has been abused. All these people who have done all this research to say, Hey, this is what works in classrooms. We read that and we say, okay, this is what works in classrooms. These are best practices. I must go and enforce these best practices in every single classroom I enter.

That's not buildership. Buildership says, Hey, listen, here's the root cause. Here's why things are not, you know, absolutely amazing yet, here's the thing you need to work on right now and here's why you need to work on this thing. And so let me invite you because I believe it's in you. And so let me invite you to work on this thing together. This is the call to action. This is where we really need to focus and here's why. Because if you do this, this is what will happen to your classroom. If you're a feedback conversation doesn't follow that trajectory. There is no reason why a teacher who want to accept your feedback other than they are being compliant or they feel coerced, and I'm going to tell you right now, compliant and coerce. People do not build better schools. What they do if they try to do the least amount of work they can to stay off of your naughty list and that's not what you want.

You want your teachers consistently growing. 

You want a school where everybody is thriving. You want a school where everybody is focused on what are we building and and, and how can I get better at it? You want people who are committed to your core values, your mission and your vision and they're examining their own practice on a day to day basis to figure out how can I better embody these core values? How can I make sure that the work that I'm doing is on mission and how can I do things in the classroom that will help our school achieve this vision that we have for our students? And if your feedback is not an inviting people into that, if your feedback, it's not giving people tangible information about how they can do that better and if your feedback, it's not keeping that vision in front of people, then your feedback is failing.

That's the thing about being a builder. Builders don't have time for incremental tweaks. They don't have time to play the feedback game. They don't have time to do to do the feedback. Dance with people. They don't have time to check things off of a list and leave it in somebody's classroom and a hope that they read it and hope that they get better. Builders don't have time for any of that because they are building something bigger. They are trans forming their school. They're not fixing it. They're not plugging leaks in someone's practice. They see themselves as transformational agents in the school. They are building something better and so the feedback, the way that we've been trained to give feedback does not serve that goal. All it does is it maintains the current school that you have. It may plug in a couple of leaks here and there, but it's not doing the transformation work that you came here to do.

You want to do that kind of work, you need to do feedback differently. You need a new way of doing feedback. You need to unlearn a lot of what you've been taught about how to give feedback and learn how to give feedback in a way that is going to trans form teachers practice. 

Now, before we go, 

I want to invite you to builder’s lab. We're going to be doing that at builder's lab. We spend two or three sessions of builders lab working on feedback and it's not just sit get, we actually spend time practicing.

So we do something day one called micro slicing where we are looking at video snippets of real classrooms and I am showing you how to find the root cause. We have a lot of discussion. There's a lot of practice. By the time you're done you will be micro slicing like a builder in builder's labs.

So I invite you to join us. We have two coming up this summer.

The first one is happening June 24th through 26th in Palm Springs, California.

And then the second one is builder's lab, the coaches edition, which really doubled down on the feedback because coaches really struggle and giving people good feedback. They get, they struggled and helping people accept their feedback because they don't have the positional authority to enforce it. So we show you how to give people feedback they cannot resist and that's happening July 15 through 17 right outside of Washington DC in Arlington, Virginia.

And you can go to https://mindstepsinc.com/builders-lab to join us.to www.mindstepsinc.com/builders-lab and get your ticket now.

After you registered for builder's lab, let me know that you've registered, that you're coming on LinkedIn so that I can start looking for you and getting to know you a little bit. Because builders lab is really intimate, intensive. We work really, really hard but we work closely together. We keep it small so that we can dig in together and do the work. And I can give you my personal support.

Now let's make sure that we're connected on LinkedIn. I say this every week. A lot of us are starting to get connected on linkedin. If you want to ask questions about this episode, if you, if you want to find out more, that's the place to catch me.

Catch me on LinkedIn and if we're not connected, I'm Robyn Jackson on Linkedin. So let's be connected and then I need to ask you a favor just like I do every week because I want to get the word out.   

I need to ask you a favor just like I do every week because I want to get the word out. I am seeing show many school administrators and instructional coaches who are, are killing themselves to get into classroom and they're killing themselves. So you know, fill out all the paperwork and they're so frustrated because they're giving teachers feedback, but teachers are resisting their feedback or teachers are feeling defensive about their feedback or teachers are ignoring their feedback all together. And so I want to help more people and I need your help to do that. So would you do one of two things for me, which you leave a review of this podcast on iTunes because if you do that, that helps other people find the show and also gives me really great feedback about what I should be doing.

Because remember, feedback is a two way street. So this is your opportunity to give me feedback to help me make the show even better. And the second thing is would you share this episode with somebody who really needs it? If you've got a colleague who is really frustrated with giving feedback to teachers either because teachers are ignoring it or the resisting it or or, or if you are a teacher yourself and you're saying, you know what, I really wished that I was getting that kind of feedback. Here's, share this episode with your administrator, have the conversation and show them this is the kind of feedback that I really need. I'd appreciate it. 

And if you're not sure how to do that, there's a link on the show notes, just go to the show notes on schoolleadershipreimagined.com/episode35 and we have a link that walks you through how to write a review.

If you could go there and click that link and then leave an honest review on iTunes, it would really help other people find this podcast. Plus it gets me some really great feedback and shows me what I need to be doing to make sure that this stays valuable for you.

Maybe you are too shy to do a review, but you can still help me out because the other thing you can do is if you found today's podcast useful, would you mind sharing it with two people who you also think would benefit from this podcast?

So maybe you are a school administrator and you want to share it with the rest of your administrative team.
Maybe you're an instructional coach and you want to share it with your school administrators.
Maybe you're a district leader and the people that you support at different schools could really benefit from this.

Would you mind sharing this with others? Because that would be, I would count that as a huge favor and I know it would get the word out to this podcast and other people. Plus you look like a hero too because you're passing on a really great resource. 

Next week...

Now let's talk about next week.

We've talked about culture. That was episode 34.
This episode it's about feedback.

The next episode we're going to talk about is support because once you give people feedback, you have to be able to follow up with giving them really the right kind of support, and I'll be honest with you, the wave it we give people support in schools right now isn't very supportive.

So next week we're going to talk about how you can give people really targeted, individualized, personalized support and how you can do it like a builder. I hope you'll join me next time

Bye for now. See you next time. 

Thank you for listening to the School Leadership Reimagined podcast for show notes and free downloads visit https://schoolleadershipreimagined.com/

School Leadership Reimagined is brought to you by Mindsteps Inc, where we build master teachers.