Gathering evidence

This handbook outlines best practices and resources to support educators in sharing meaningful feedback on teaching practice. Meaningful feedback helps teachers connect their areas of strength and priority areas for growth in their professional practice to next steps that will improve students’ learning. These resources support an ongoing feedback process where feedback-givers and teachers collaboratively collect and make meaning of evidence related to teaching practice, and use it to inform the development of next steps in order to refine teaching practice and advance student learning.

Specifically, this handbook contains:

• an overview of key research that shows the critical role that the feedback process plays in supporting teacher development and student learning;
• a discussion of the importance of building trusting relationships as the foundation of the feedback process, as well as ways in which the feedback process can itself build trust;
• promising practices and resources for engaging in all steps of the feedback process, including gathering evidence, preparing to share feedback, engaging in feedback conversations, and following up;
• guidance for engaging in milestone conversations to reflect on the feedback process over time; and
• an appendix of resources to support prioritizing and engaging in all stages of the feedback process.

Access a version of this resource compatible with assistive technology and screen-readers.

This form can be used by classroom observers to capture low-inference evidence of teacher practice and student actions in a lesson. Best practices for low-inference note taking may be found on pages 32 - 34 of The Power of Feedback: Supporting Teacher Development. 

This document contains examples of questions that an observer might ask a teacher and students before, during, and after an observation in order to elicit evidence of student learning.