LEAD - Learning Enhancement and Academic Development
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/14083
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Item ‘Now you’ve said it, it’s like a big light bulb!’: enacting post observation feedback suggestions(Taylor and Francis Group, 2024-08-14) Donaghue, Helen; Heron, MarionTeaching observations have become a ubiquitous feature of teacher education programmes, development schemes and assessment regimes. Whilst the processes and procedures of classroom observation are well documented, the feedback which follows teaching observations has been given less attention. Most research into teaching observations focuses on eliciting teachers’ perspectives on their experiences of being observed. In contrast, we examine two aspects vital to teacher development and enhanced teaching practice: (1) post observation feedback talk; (2) teachers’ enactment of feedback following the feedback session. This article argues that examining feedback talk and how talk may influence enactment can help both observers and teachers maximise the effectiveness of teaching observations. We focus on suggestions, a common way of helping teachers to develop and improve. We analyse empirical examples of authentic post observation feedback talk to explore how suggestions are made and responded to, identifying features of suggestions which prompt teacher understanding and enactment. Analysis enables us to provide observers with concrete advice on how to make suggestions, thus showing the practical affordances and methodological warrant of analysing feedback talk.Item Feedback talk as a means of creating, ratifying and normalising an institutionally valued teacher identity(Routledge, 2020-02-12) Donaghue, HelenThis article examines language teacher identity negotiated in situated, work-based talk. Using a linguistic ethnographic approach, micro analysis of extracts from post observation feedback between experienced teachers and supervisors is supplemented with ethnographic data. Analysis reveals that during feedback talk, one particular identity is co-constructed, ratified, and prioritized by teachers and supervisors: a teacher proficient in and enthusiastic about technology. This identity is related to a broader, macro context of government and institutional initiatives. Feedback talk operates to fashion and normalise this identity, and the repeated identity production reifies institutional priorities and helps maintain popular macro discourses favouring technology in education. The prioritised identity is realised through talk, teacher development, and teaching practice, as teachers make evident processes of learning connected to educational technology and describe using technology-related classroom activities. Teachers are complicit in co-constructing this favoured identity, showing a connection between teacher agency and broader power structures.Item Teachers and supervisors negotiating face during critical account requests in post observation feedback(De Gruyter, 2021-04-22) Donaghue, HelenThis article shows, through the analysis of “real life” institutional interaction, how experienced teachers and supervisors negotiate face when teachers contest or manage supervisors’ critical account requests during post observation feedback meetings. A linguistic micro-analysis of data extracts is supplemented with ethnographic data drawn from participant perspective interviews and researcher knowledge. The analysis shows how participants subtly and skillfully employ facework to manage the potential face-threat engendered by criticism and disagreement. This facework is mostly successful, but in one case the supervisor orients to face-threat and closes down the topic of discussion. This demonstrates that face is consequential to both unfolding talk and the feedback goal of dialogue and development. Feedback participants, both supervisors and teachers, also engage in moves of face support and face maintenance. The analysis shows face to be an emergent, situated relationship, co-constructed by both participants, and also shows that participants are willing to risk face-threat to achieve institutional goals (supervisors) and defend their actions (teachers). This supports the view that face-threat is rational and common and indicates that criticism, account requests, and disagreements are acceptable norms in post observation feedback.