Collecting feedback can signify a school or system’s commitment to success

Collecting feedback from educators and other staff can help leaders make critical adjustments to support more effective teaching and learning.

Collecting feedback on work and teaching processes is an intentional practice demonstrating a school or system’s values related to how it wants to carry out its important work with students and educators alike. It provides a structure to measure success criteria related to system-wide practices, broader initiatives, and goals, and it allows educators and other staff to make adjustments to become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive in their work.

Use this in order to…

• Discover possible inequities around the ways in which staff work together and with students.

• Create and use a protocol to evaluate and generate feedback on teaching and learning processes.

“Since processes can oftentimes perpetuate the dominant voice and/or authority figure, it is important to continually collect feedback from all stakeholders to maintain an inclusive environment.” – Mary Rice-Boothe, NYCLA

Key Components

• Craft a values statement (if one doesn’t already exist) about how your system or district does its work, using an inclusive process that seeks input from stakeholders across the school community.

• Consider potential sub-groups, including grade-level or subject-area teams, and whether they want to craft their own unique values and priorities statements.

• Create expectations for collecting process-centered feedback by building it into management, mentorship, and other formalized review and accountability structures.

Considerations for Implementation

• Identify and mitigate biases that are exacerbated in remote work, such as distance and recency bias, which may lead to assumptions and affect perceptions. Ask questions and seek to understand – rather than making conclusions around a colleague’s situation.

• Encourage all participants to be on video to be able to observe nonverbal cues during remote staff meetings and touchpoints.

• Be mindful of the remote work context as the school or system looks at all the ways that the work takes place – including how meetings are organized/facilitated, what gets communicated, and when work happens.

The Remote DEI Collective was a collaborative group led by The Learning Accelerator (TLA), and brought together participants from remote organizations to address the challenges of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in remote environments. This strategy has been adapted from the Remote DEI Collective’s toolkit, which was built to offer resources to improve remote culture and practices, in order to better suit leaders and educators working for schools that offer virtual and hybrid learning options to students.