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LEAD - Learning Enhancement and Academic Development

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/14083

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Post Observation Feedback

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    ‘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, Marion
    Teaching 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.
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    Relational work and identity negotiation in critical post observation teacher feedback
    (Elsevier, 2018-08-15) Donaghue, Helen
    This article responds to the call for more empirical research to further our understanding of how identities are produced and performed in discourse. Data extracts from dyadic post observation feedback meetings between an experienced teacher and two supervisors are analysed. Analysis focuses on the relational work participants do to achieve identities in interaction. Analysis reveals delicate and complex negotiation processes as participants claim, ascribe, challenge, and relinquish local identities. Analysis shows that identities are emergent, relational and co-constructed, and that (im)politeness is an interactional resource used to construct identities. This article extends previous research by comparing interactants' relational work. Analysis of data extracts from two different meetings in which a supervisor points out the same teaching problem (poor instructions) with the same teacher enables a comparison of how identities are achieved. One supervisor uses politeness strategies while the other adopts aggressive and critical behaviour to claim and ascribe the same identities. In both instances the teacher resists but then co-constructs his negative ascribed identity. Within a linguistic ethnographic framework, micro analysis of feedback talk is supplemented with ethnographic interview data to enable a contextualised examination. Ethnographic data reveal the influence of institutional goals on local identity construction and relational work.
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    ‘Time to construct positive identities’: display questions in post observation teacher feedback
    (Routledge, 2019-03-14) Donaghue, Helen
    This article focuses on the use of display questions to construct positive identities in post observation feedback talk between in-service English language teachers and a supervisor. Using a linguistic ethnographic framework, microanalysis of dyadic feedback interaction is supplemented with ethnographic data gathered from participant perspective interviews and researcher knowledge of the research site and participants. Results show that display questions give feedback participants the opportunity to voice their knowledge and expertise thereby enabling them to claim positive identities. Display questions are also used by the supervisor to claim a practising teacher identity in order to reassure teachers of his worth as an observer and leader. Display questions help the supervisor perform a manager identity as they allow him to control the topic and evaluate teachers. While some teachers verify this identity by complying and providing the required answer, one teacher resists, replying reluctantly and with irritation, thereby contesting the supervisor’s manager identity. This shows that identities are fluid, contestable, and discursively accomplished in situated feedback talk. Two practical implications are discussed: (1) the need for further research into feedback with in-service teachers (2) the suggestion that supervisors examine extracts from feedback to help them become more reflective and critical practitioners.
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    Feedback talk as a means of creating, ratifying and normalising an institutionally valued teacher identity
    (Routledge, 2020-02-12) Donaghue, Helen
    This 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.
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    Teachers and supervisors negotiating face during critical account requests in post observation feedback
    (De Gruyter, 2021-04-22) Donaghue, Helen
    This 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.