Feedback Is a Gift. So, Why Is It So Hard to Receive?
Early in my teaching career, I was fortunate to work under a great administrator who told me, “Feedback is a gift.” I have never forgotten that.
Yet, teachers have a complicated relationship with feedback. We know the value of providing quality feedback to students. When students receive feedback, we hope they engage with it on a metacognitive level: reflecting on what they did well, identifying where their understanding falls short of expectations, and using that information to improve. When students don't engage with our feedback, it can be frustrating. Why should I spend so much time writing detailed comments if they aren't even going to read them? Why don't they want to improve?
But there's another question worth asking:
How well do we engage with feedback when we're the ones receiving it?
Knowing Feedback Matters Isn't Enough
For teachers, feedback often comes with baggage. Part of the problem is structural. Many teachers receive their most formal feedback through the evaluation process and primarily from administrators. That means feedback and judgment can become almost synonymous. And nobody particularly enjoys feeling judged.
Teaching makes that vulnerability even more complicated because classrooms are dynamic places. A lesson that worked beautifully with one class can fall flat with another. Students have good days and bad days. So do teachers. And, inevitably, the class that has been running like clockwork all week will decide to go completely off the rails approximately thirty seconds after your principal walks through the door. One brief observation can feel less like an opportunity for growth and more like a verdict.
Research suggests that this context matters considerably.
What Makes Teachers Actually Value Feedback?
A study conducted for the Institute of Education Sciences identified several conditions that influence whether teachers value the evaluative feedback they receive from administrators (Cherasaro et al., 2016).
First and foremost, teachers need to consider the evaluator credible. That credibility also influences whether teachers perceive the feedback itself as useful. Teachers need to believe that the feedback is accurate and timely, and they need access to the resources, such as time, professional development, or coaching, that allow them to actually implement it. Later research examining teacher feedback identified similarly important characteristics. Effective feedback was connected to clear indicators, grounded in evidence of observable behavior, oriented toward goals, and, perhaps most importantly, actionable.
Yet researchers also found that much of the feedback teachers receive isn't sufficiently tailored to their individual needs. Generalized feedback may satisfy the requirements of an evaluation system without necessarily giving a teacher meaningful information about what to do next; that's an important distinction.
Feedback can evaluate performance without actually developing the person receiving it.
Evaluation and Growth Aren't the Same Thing
This is where I think we need to reconsider the way teachers experience feedback.
An administrator can be thoughtful, knowledgeable, and deeply committed to teacher growth and still occupy an evaluative role. There is an inherent power dynamic in that relationship. When the person providing feedback is also responsible for judging your performance, it is difficult to completely separate development from evaluation.
That doesn't make administrator feedback unimportant. It means administrator feedback shouldn't be the only feedback teachers receive.
Schools can help by making non-evaluative walkthroughs, peer observation, and collaborative reflection more common. The more frequently teachers experience feedback outside formal evaluation, the less every conversation about practice has to feel like a judgment. I think there's another structure worth considering: coaching.
What Changes When Feedback Comes from a Coach?
Coaching creates a fundamentally different feedback relationship. The purpose isn't to determine whether your teaching meets a performance standard. The purpose is to help you examine your practice, identify where you want to grow, and figure out what might move you forward.
That changes the conversation. Instead of Here's what you did wrong, the conversation can become What did you notice? Instead of Here's what you need to improve, it can become Where do you want to go next? Coaching allows teachers to engage in an ongoing cycle of trying something, reflecting on what happened, receiving feedback, adjusting, and trying again without the risk of formal evaluation.
That doesn't mean coaching feedback should always be comfortable. Useful feedback sometimes challenges our assumptions or points out something we haven't been able or willing to see in ourselves. However, there is a difference between being challenged and being judged.
A strong coaching relationship creates enough psychological safety for a teacher to say, This isn't working, and I don't know what to do next without worrying that the admission itself will be used as evidence against them, which may be one of the conditions teachers need most in order to grow.
Yes, Feedback Is a Gift
I've carried that administrator's words with me for years: Feedback is a gift. I still believe that, but I've come to think something is missing from the phrase.
Feedback becomes a gift when we trust the person giving it, and it's grounded in evidence rather than assumption. When it's specific enough to help us see something we couldn't see ourselves, and we have the resources and support to act on it. Perhaps most importantly, feedback is a gift when we know its purpose is to help us grow rather than simply to measure where we are.
Teachers deserve that kind of feedback. Not just during evaluation season, or when something has gone wrong, and not just from the person responsible for evaluating them. We ask teachers to be reflective practitioners, continually examining, adjusting, learning, and growing, and they shouldn't have to do all of that reflecting alone.
Studies cited for this post can be found here:
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