Principals and other school leaders tend to rely on critical feedback - feedback that is "honest" and "authentic" in terms of highlighting what a teacher is doing well and what they are not doing well - as the basis for improving teaching performance. This approach relies on telling people the "truth" about their performance as a basic strategy for getting them to improve their teaching, but I am not convinced this is actually the best way to motivate personal improvement, whether it be in education or otherwise. My reasons for challenging this practice are that:

1) I don't believe we are able to rate the performance of others very reliably,

2) findings from neuroscience (see especially the work of Joseph LeDoux) suggest that critical feedback is usually perceived as criticism, and this actually inhibits new learning (which the critical feedback strategy assumes to be the basis of improved performance),

3) I believe that the qualities which contribute to performance improvement are highly individual and therefore can't easily be linked to more generic "criteria" for evaluating the desired improvement, and

4) I don't think we are very good at conceptualising these criteria in the first instance and then transferring these abstract concepts into clear evaluations of how others are meeting them.

I am interested in your response to my position, to what you think about the use of critical feedback as a strategy for improving teaching performance in schools (usually associated with school improvement agendas), and ask that you think about the issues I have raised and then respond to the following questions:

1. Do you view critical feedback as a valid strategy for the purpose of improving teaching performance - why or why not?

2. How do you think we could go about encouraging teaching improvement in ways that do not rely on critical feedback - what else might we focus on as he basis for this sort of improvement?

Thanking you kindly for your time and effort in responding to my questions!