Best Practice

Staff feedback: How to give hard messages

CPD Pay and conditions Senior leadership Middle leadership Teaching staff
Feedback – this time it’s professional. High-quality appraisal and feedback is essential to teachers’ professional development and progress. But the personal element can make these interactions difficult. John Dabell gives some advice

Thoughtful, suitably timed feedback intended to help staff improve is critical because we cannot rely on self-assessment.

Professional growth comes through personal feedback and it is quite a cocktail of emotion because it inevitably mixes negative and constructive messages.

When there are plenty of positives to talk about then it is a pleasure and enjoyable part of being a manager or appraiser. But giving feedback to staff that are underperforming and delivering “hard messages” is challenging to say the least and not for the faint-hearted. “Tough love” is seldom pretty, as people can get super-defensive, if not to your face, then in the days and weeks afterwards.

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