The Trouble with ‘Delivering Feedback’: Reflections of a Supervision Scholar

As a scholar of supervision and after years of teaching principals, I have begun to rethink what it means for principals to deliver feedback to improve teachers’ instruction. I realized that I held many troubling assumptions. In this essay, I describe the contexts within which my assumptions had taken root, then use selected literature to look more closely at each. In the final section, I address the question: What do principals do if they no longer deliver feedback? This inquiry helped me understand that commonly held assumptions about “delivering feedback” promote an oversimplified view of teaching and its improvement, keep teachers in a dependent relationship, and fail to help them develop their own understanding of accountability.