'What Do You Need Wednesday?' from The Beacon
(Still) "...every tiny thing by one percent..."
What Do You Need? is a weekly touchpoint for educators committed to professional growth and excellence. A spinoff of our longstanding internal newsletter, these posts provide a handpicked assortment of current research, timely resources, and inspiring content. Covering a broad spectrum of topics relevant to teaching and learning, WDYN aims to be a go-to guide for educators who are devoted to their own continuous improvement and that of their students.
While good feedback happens at regular intervals in the classroom—indeed even daily—with formal comment season approaching, this week’s WDYN focuses on an array of elements related to delivering effective feedback. We look at some recent research on instructor mindset beliefs, we point to some moves you might make related to “non-content instructor talk,” and we share the excellent Feedback in Practice: Research for Teachers guide from The Tang Institute at Andover.
🪴 Actions + Words = A Culture of Growth
A 2022 study involving researchers from multiple higher education institutions revealed that students are keenly aware of their instructors' behaviors, which they use to gauge their beliefs about intelligence. This insight is crucial as students who perceive that their instructors embrace a growth mindset—the belief that intelligence is malleable and can be developed—are more likely to be motivated, engaged, and successful in the classroom
The study highlights four essential behaviors that signal a growth mindset:
Explicitly affirming that success is achievable through effort for all students.
Providing abundant opportunities for practice and feedback.
Offering support and guidance in response to poor performance, rather than mere criticism.
Demonstrating a genuine commitment to student learning and development.
By embodying these behaviors, instructors can cultivate a classroom atmosphere that encourages and nurtures student growth. While the application of growth mindset interventions has evolved, understanding how students perceive their teachers’ beliefs remains a pivotal aspect of effective teaching.
🗣️ Talk the Talk (and Walk it Too)
Over at the University of Virginia’s Teaching Hub, there is a veritable treasure trove of resources related to “non-content ‘instructor talk’ and instructional moves that help students guide their reasoning, engage with each other intellectually, and feel connected.” Each week we carefully curate an array of resources and materials that seek to help us grow our crafts as teachers. This resource collection is one of our recent favorites, precisely because of its emphasis on “non-content” words. While many of the linked resources on the page relate to STEM courses, one needn’t engage in a great deal of mental gymnastics to see their significance in any discipline, or in lower, middle, and upper schools. We highly encourage you to poke around the space, but we’ll leave you with the Talk Activities Flow Chart below—an excellent resource for clarifying desired outcomes around student-to-student, or student-to-teacher, interactions in the classroom.
💪 More Work for the Recipient
We close our resources by sharing (again) The Tang Institute at Andover’s Feedback in Practice: Research for Teachers document, an excellent collection and distillation of feedback techniques that drive student learning. Organized around four big ideas and with examples of what does (and does not) constitute effective feedback, the resource offers a series of case studies and examples of beneficial feedback in practice. While the entire document is worth your time, we particularly appreciate ‘Big Idea #2—Identity and Relationships Matter in Feedback.’ You’ll notice echoes of the importance of cultivating a culture of growth in the classroom, shared in our first heading today, and so too will you encounter the importance of establishing relationships where candid feedback is valued and acknowledged, something we cherish and promote regularly here in our community. With comment season fast approaching, it’s important to consider these ideas alongside your daily practice in the classroom.
📖 The Last Word
The Last Word is meant to be a final nudge to prime your thinking for the work ahead. While typically adjacent to our more research-dense offerings, the Last Word strives to be eclectic, occasionally playful, and consistently thought-provoking. This week’s edition draws from economist Joseph Schumpeter, who observed:
“Pessimistic visions about almost anything always strike the public as more erudite than optimistic ones.”
In a playful nod to Schumpeter, also known for his theory of ‘creative destruction,’ we feature a recent Brick Technology video. It showcases formidable Lego machines that cleverly dismantle a seemingly invincible Lego tower— a vivid illustration of dismantling old barriers to build new possibilities.