Feedback Should End with Practice, Not Advice

Throughout this course, we have explored how effective mentors observe practice, ask purposeful questions and use the ITTECF to identify precise developmental targets. However, identifying a target is only the beginning. One of the biggest misconceptions in mentoring is that once feedback has been given, improvement will naturally follow.

For example, a mentor might say:

"Next lesson, improve your questioning."

Whilst this identifies the area requiring development, it does very little to help the trainee understand how to improve.

Educational research consistently suggests that simply receiving feedback rarely changes professional practice. Instead, improvement occurs when individuals have opportunities to understand, practise and refine new techniques before applying them independently (Education Endowment Foundation, 2021).

Effective mentors therefore move beyond feedback. They help trainees learn the new technique.

From Feedback to Deliberate Practice

The Education Endowment Foundation's Effective Professional Development Guidance Report identifies developing teaching techniques and embedding practice as two of the key mechanisms through which professional development improves teaching (Education Endowment Foundation, 2021).

Importantly, the guidance suggests that teachers are more likely to improve when they have opportunities to:

• observe effective practice;
• break complex skills into smaller components;
• practise those components in a supportive environment;
• receive feedback during practice;
• revisit the technique over time.

This process is known as deliberate practice.

Rather than expecting trainees to improve simply by teaching another lesson, deliberate practice allows them to rehearse individual teaching techniques until they become increasingly fluent.

For mentors, this means asking an important question:

"How can I help the trainee practise this before they teach it?"

Step 1: Deconstruct the Practice

Teaching is an incredibly complex activity. Expert teachers routinely make hundreds of professional decisions during a lesson. For novice teachers, trying to improve several aspects of teaching simultaneously can quickly become overwhelming.

As we've already discussed, Rosenshine (2012) argues that effective teaching develops through mastering smaller components before integrating them into increasingly complex classroom practice.

This is why effective mentors deconstruct teaching. Instead of asking a trainee to improve an entire area of practice, mentors identify the smallest teachable component.

For example:

Observation

Pupils became confused during independent work.

Broad feedback

"Improve your explanations."

Deconstructed feedback

The mentor identifies that the issue is not explanations generally.

Instead, pupils were unclear about what success looked like before beginning the task.

The feedback therefore becomes:

"Before independent work begins, clearly model one complete example and explicitly explain why it meets the success criteria."

Notice how the mentor has reduced a broad teaching skill into one manageable improvement.

Step 2: Model the Technique

Once the teaching technique has been identified, mentors should avoid assuming that trainees already know what effective implementation looks like.

The ITTECF's Learn how to statements describe practices trainees are expected to develop. However, reading the statement alone is unlikely to result in confident implementation.

Modelling bridges this gap. The mentor demonstrates what successful practice looks like.

This might involve:

• demonstrating part of a lesson;
• scripting a teacher explanation;
• role-playing classroom dialogue;
• showing an annotated lesson plan;
• analysing a recorded lesson;
• jointly planning questions.

Rosenshine (2012) emphasises that novices benefit from seeing expert performance before attempting the skill independently. Similarly, instructional coaching places considerable emphasis on mentor modelling before expecting implementation. Modelling makes invisible professional thinking visible. So, rather than telling trainees what to do, mentors show them what success looks like.

Step 3: Rehearse Before Teaching

One of the biggest differences between effective mentoring and simply giving feedback is rehearsal. Imagine a trainee has been encouraged to improve their classroom questioning. Rather than waiting until next week's observation, the mentor could spend five minutes rehearsing the technique together.

For example:

The mentor acts as a pupil, the trainee practises asking their planned questions, the mentor deliberately gives unexpected responses.

Together, they refine:

• question wording;
• wait time;
• follow-up prompts;
• responses to misconceptions.

This provides immediate feedback before the trainee returns to the classroom. The trainee enters the next lesson having already practised the technique several times.

This significantly increases the likelihood that the new strategy will be implemented successfully.