But professional impressions based on data are 9.5 x's more powerful!

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Feedback to Joe Using Data - A teaching episode contains an immense amount of data that could and should be used for feedback, coaching, and teaching growth indicators.

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•Teacher Actions (questions, responses, wait-time)

"Joe, you asked 56 questions during class today. 38 were yes/no type questions, 15 were recall type questions, and 3 questions required students to think at a higher level. You stated you wanted students to think deeply about momentum. The data from the first lesson to the second were quite similar. How does your questioning promote higher-level thinking? What would the questioning data look like after the next observation that would be more consistent with your goals for instruction?"

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"Joe, after getting a student's response, the data for interaction patterns clearly shows that 45 times you clarified the student's answer vs. asking the student to tell you more about their thinking. So, following a short student response, you then talk and often launch off into a mini-lecture and add a whole lot of meaning and interpret that response with your words and your thinking. When you clarify for the student, you are doing the thinking, and we learn what you know, not what the student knows or doesn't know. How does that fit your goal of getting students to think deeply, and what might you do instead? What predominant pattern should we see at the next lesson observation that will be more in line with promoting student thinking?"

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"Joe, we know that even for the average student to come up with a response, and especially to think deeply, they have to be offered the time to think, and few students think super-fast, especially the students with some learning challenges. Let's look at the data on your use of wait-time. For the first lesson, your wait-time one average was 1 second, and your wait-time two average was .5 seconds. For the second lesson, your wait-time one average was 1.2 seconds, and your wait-time two average was .7 seconds. Yes, you are showing a tiny bit of improvement, but a long way from the 3.5-second average that research indicates is the tipping point for seeing some of the positive benefits of using wait-time. By the way, the wait-time tables show that your wait-time for the questions requiring students to think more deeply was about the same as for yes/no questions. Let's talk about a specific strategy for you to employ to increase your wait-time and see if the data from observation #3 shows a substantive increase in wait-time, or not."

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•Student Actions and Engagement

"Joe, the observer, and you both felt like students were engaged in the lesson. But looking at the seating chart heat map showing which students responded to questions, it shows quite clearly that five of the 30 students answered most of the questions, and a couple more students answered a few questions. We talked about some teaching strategies that get all students to respond so you can find out what most students are thinking and whether they are learning or developing more solid thinking about momentum. Which of those strategies could you employ here so that for the next observation, the heat map has color and multiple responses for all the students?"

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•Misbehaviors and Teacher Reactions

"Joe, you said that 4th period was a class with many misbehavior, and it was a class full of misfits. Here is the data I gathered about the misbehaviors and your reactions. The seating chart heat map shows that all the misbehaviors came from five students - just five students. Look at the map, which shows that those students are all at tables away from the front of the room where you stand. The problem lies with only those five individual students causing problems, so let's talk about how you can minimize their misbehaviors and de-escalate the commotion vs. the interactions you have with them that escalate in nature. Let's pull up the misbehavior events data linked to the video, watch how you handled the problems, and then talk about what you could do instead. Let's connect this data with the seating chart heat map, showing only five students answered questions. What do you see as a possible connection between not being engaged in the lesson and, instead, finding other non-productive things to do in class?"

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Data and Evidence at our Fingertips

Teaching episodes contain a digital fingerprint of teacher and student actions that are evidence of current practice and can also be used as indicators of change in practice. What data are now readily available and can be easily collected and used for feedback and coaching future or current teachers? Below are some brief descriptions and the Overview and Features document provides an in-depth review of such data along with the analysis that can be used to deconstruct a teaching episode and then develop a plan for improving teaching based on data and objective indicators of teaching effectiveness.