An Examination of New Jersey’s Principals’ and Assistant Principals’ Perception on Delivering Effective Feedback in the Evaluative Post Conference with Regard to Time, Protocols, & Training

Danny, Lucy

Dissertation

An Examination of New Jersey’s Principals’ and Assistant Principals’ Perception on Delivering Effective Feedback in the Evaluative Post Conference with Regard to Time, Protocols, & Training

Public Deposited

The purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate New Jersey public school principals’ and assistant principals’ perceptions on the effectiveness of feedback delivery to teachers during post-observation conferences. Specifically, principals’ and assistant principals’ perceptions of how time, training, and protocols impact the process of providing effective feedback to teachers during the post-observation process. Federal guidelines and NJ state statutes have placed a greater emphasis on the role of principals and assistant principals to provide more complex feedback to teachers in the New Jersey teacher evaluation model (New Jersey Department of Education [NJDOE], 2015; NJDOE, 2017b; USDOE, 2012; Popham, 2013). Studies suggest that if the post-conference feedback is effective and promotes teacher effectiveness, principals and assistant principals must have time for feedback, utilize an effective feedback protocol, and be adequately trained to provide the feedback (Education First, 2015; Park et al., 2014). In addition, these feedback supports or processes, norms, and structures must be in place to ensure that the post-evaluation conference is a success (Park et al., 2014). In the post-conference, the feedback process must be useful, specific, constructive, timely, allow and encourage teachers to share their thoughts, and create a collaborative process that results in professional goal setting. The study found that principals and assistant principals did not always have time post-conference for an effective feedback process. In addition, instructional leaders did not always utilize an effective post-conference feedback protocol with fidelity. The researcher also found that principals and assistant principals do not strongly agree that they were trained adequately to provide effective feedback in the post-conference session. Collaboration between teachers and instructional leaders yielded the lowest mean in all three supports in the study. This finding suggests that there was not enough time for collaboration in the feedback process. Collaboration was the least utilized by both principals and assistant principals, and both groups perceived they were the least adequately trained in collaborating with teachers to set professional goals.

Last modified