Skilled Helping and Feedback: a Brand New Pilgrims Course
Adrian Underhill, UK
Adrian Underhill works as an international ELT consultant and trainer, which means things like running training courses, writing articles, working as series editor for the Macmillan Books for Teachers and speaking at conferences. Increasingly he provides training and consultancy for leadership and management in ELT organisations, helping them develop schools that are themselves learning cultures. He has been teacher, trainer and director of the International Teacher Training Institute at International House in Hastings and is a past president of IATEFL. A few years ago he followed an inspirational Masters course in Responsibility and Business Practice, as a result of which he developed a passion for the learning power of Action Inquiry and reflective practices, which he now integrates into his workshops and consultancies. E-mail: adrian@aunderhill.co.uk
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First experience of good feedback
Six Category Intervention Analysis
A small sample of interventions
My first professional experience of being given skilful feedback on my teaching performance was when I was a trainee on my initial teacher training course. I was apprehensive about both teaching practice and feedback, but amazed by the powerful effect of being told the ‘truth’ supportively, honestly and skilfully. I had never really experienced such a non-judgmental approach to helping, and along with accurate feedback on my performance. It was kind of risky and edgy, but breathtaking and exhilarating at the same time, almost a liberation. The result was that I grew in confidence, and felt encouraged to change and experiment and improve what I did.
In due course I became a trainer myself with responsibility for observing teachers and giving feedback. At the time I thought the content and conduct of the feedback sessions I gave to the teachers was OK, but in fact I had no model and no criteria against which to gauge whether I was doing it well or not, nor did I have an expanded vocabulary with which to discuss and reflect on the finer contours of the feedback. And it was only later that I came to see just how the quality of the feedback giver’s own personal intention colours everything in a way that may be invisible to the feedback giver but is nevertheless picked by the recipient.
At that time I was Director of the International Teacher Training Institute in Hastings, and with the team of marvellous trainers there we began systematically to explore different approaches to giving feedback. We soon realised how these same feedback skills could be applied to each other, and we began offering peer supervision on each other’s working styles, and this became the basis for the development of our school culture as a learning organisation. And we became aware that any intelligent system whether staffroom, classroom, school, being a learner, the human body or the rain forest relies on multiple feedback loops embedded at every level.
The next step in my exploration of skilful feedback came when I joined a 2-year post graduate diploma course in Facilitation Styles at the Human Potential Research Project, set up by John Heron at Surrey University. Heron had pioneered a number of innovative and learnable approaches to interpersonal skills training, and one of them was based on a model of his own design which he called Six Category Intervention Analysis (when we complained about this technical title he laughed and explained that people skills sounded more impressive with a heavy and analytical title, however he did change the title of the 4th edition of his book to Helping the Client…..).
What I learned began to make the subtle, usually invisible and sometimes perilous moves of feedback more visible. I’ll just mention three aspects of his model that had an immediate practical impact:
- Distinguishing between feedback interventions that are authoritative where the trainer takes the lead, and those which are facilitative, where the trainer enables the feedback recipient to take the lead.
- Breaking down all the kinds of interventions into their primary intention and finding that they fell quite neatly into a mere six categories, few enough to keep an eye on yet enough to allow precision. See box 1 for brief examples of the six families of intervention. Note that the wordings are mine and it is important that each trainer finds the words that feel authentic to them.
- Then, how do you know if you are intervening well or badly, apart from a feeling in the stomach? So the next thing was a simple criteria system for determining whether your interventions are valid according to the model, or invalid, and noticing how as the feedback giver’s attention drifts so the interventions drift towards invalid, degenerating into interventions that have other unintended and usually unwelcome impacts.
BOX 1 Examples of the six families of intervention:
Note: the wordings are not fixed phrases, each trainer must find their own words to express that intention, including the desired strength, depth, angle, etc
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Supportive interventions help affirm his/her fundamental worth in a way that is authentic, honest and realistic.
- I liked/appreciated the way you…
- You have a nice way of …..
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Catalytic interventions help the teacher to explore and actively reflect on her experience in order to gain self-insight and open doors to new possibilities and choices. The trainer’s own attentive listening and non-judgemental attitude encourage this "self-discovery talk".
- Can you say more about… So are you saying that….
- What’s most important for you?
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Challenging interventions bring to light an aspect of the teacher's behaviour or attitude which she is not aware of and which may be blocking her development, or preventing her reaching her goals.
The Challenging intervention is supportive, succinct, direct and concrete. It is like "telling the truth with love". Challenge the action rather than the actor
- What I think I saw is a bit different from what you just described….
- One thing I noticed you doing which you may not be aware of is …
- What are you going to do about this?
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Cathartic interventions encourage this emotional intelligence to speak.
We are under pressure to present a public face that says everything is fine, so our affective (emotional and feeling) intelligence easily gets neglected, and we accumulate and carry around all sorts of unfinished emotional business. The trainer uses interventions to
- How do you feel about that? What is it you don’t like about that?
- What kind of outcome would make you feel really good?
- You just said it upsets you when the class does this..…. Could you say more…?
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Informative interventions give the teacher relevant information for their benefit. This could be theoretical or practical information, or feedback on their performance. The key here is giving just the right information at just the right time.
- I know a couple of other approaches to that…. Would it be useful for you to hear them…
- If you read chapter 3 in xxxx you will find ideas relating to this
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Prescriptive intervention paradoxically increases the teacher’s self-direction by giving prescription. You (the trainer) advise, suggest, recommend or direct, while leaving the recipient free to take it or leave it. However, the longer term aim is to enhance their self-directing competence.
I advise / suggest that you …. It’s essential that you….. / I insist that you…
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Ok Could you read xxxx, and then we’ll talk about it next time…
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I soon realised these kinds of skilful, intentional and supportive interventions applied not only to trainers, enabling them to give richer feedback after lesson-observation, but also to teachers, enabling them to give and receive healthy and robust feedback to students and colleagues. In fact they apply to managers wanting to develop a new team atmosphere amongst their staff, or manage annual appraisals in ways that everyone finds worthwhile. Indeed they apply to anyone who is in any way responsible for the learning and development of others and wants to help them get the best from it. And this includes anyone who has colleagues they care about. Such a collective feedback culture unlocks the human capacity for reflective practice, for learning from experience and for creating fresh experience rather then repeating old experience.
So I started to offer intensive Six Category Intervention Analysis programmes as open enrolment courses, and they proved popular because the practical training answers a real problem that exists, which is this: Feedback and ‘telling the truth with love” is a tricky area because we do not talk about it, so we cannot study it, and since we do not study it, we do not develop the vocabulary to talk about different sorts of intervention, and this makes it hard even to think about it, and so we cannot adequately reflect on or critique our performance and develop our skills…. and so the anxiety continues on both sides of the feedback room. Sadly we all know the effects of feedback that is clumsy, unskilled, insensitive, driven, or in terms of this model simply degenerate. And it can be all of these even though done from best intentions. And the impact of such feedback goes far beyond the sorry episode itself, because it percolates the whole culture of a staffroom, classroom, team, and school, even career. I have often been into staff rooms in different countries and it is as if I can sense the collective coagulation of these unhappy experiences over years.
But once we start to work with a purposeful model of different intervention strategies and practice them in small groups it is like finding a map of the unknown territory we are in. We immediately start to see the possibilities, how many ways there are open to us, how we can monitor our current feedback practice and see what we are already good at, how we can identify what we need to develop further, and then how we can actually develop those weaker areas in the space of a few days, transforming our intervention repertoire. And the outcome is that we see that we are able to plan and give worthwhile feedback in wholesome, truthful and supportive ways. Then the anxiety declines and the enjoyment of effective relating, even on crunchy and difficult issues, becomes tangible, and a different kind of culture is able to emerge, based on honest and supportive connectivity.
And for a small sample of interventions that participants become able to improvise pretty spontaneously, in this case I’ve chosen dealing with difficult situations, have a look at Box 2
| BOX 2 Expanding your repertoire of interventions: dealing with tricky situations:
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Teacher seems a bit resistant, that is also part of the change process. It can happen when people are not used to feedback or have been hurt by unskilled feedback in the past. So don't push too hard, yet. We are not trying to change people but to develop a learning environment in which teachers can become more strongly learning teachers themselves, more curious abut their practice
- Ok, I see you are not happy with that idea….
- Maybe we could return to it at a later time?
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Teacher appears reluctant to question self, e.g. is over-satisfied that good student feedback equates with good teaching. You can note this for yourself, refer to it if / when appropriate, not force it, not argue anything. But also you can say
- There are teachers who are interested to explore these things in their own teaching, and at some point you might too…. But only when it makes sense to do so
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Where the teacher has more status/seniority than the observer
Ask teacher before what aspect of their teaching they would like you to focus on? What would be helpful to them?
By all means adopt a chatty style but keep a business edge to it. You can make your anxiety into an intervention, like this:
- I’m very aware that you’ve been teaching longer than me, but
hopefully my perspectives will be of interest to you
- ……. hopefully I can provide a space for you to reflect on and critique what you do
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Teacher talks off the point and seems to be avoiding feedback
Manage this scenario by building a repertoire of interventions, e.g.
Summarising:
- Hang on, you’re saying a lot, Let me see if I’ve got your main point…. you’re saying ….. right? …… OK wait, before you go on let me ask….
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Getting the teacher to focus into specific points, away from generalities:
- OK, you’ve made several points there and I’d like to focus on this one….
- Yes you have a good point about the general situation, but could we talk specifically about what occurred in your lesson, what I saw happening and what you were part of….
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Pulling teacher back from defensiveness:
- Yes I understand your reasons for doing that, and it’s not that that I want to question, I’d just like to look at what actually happened at that point in the lesson
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