What’s the Most Useful Feedback You Ever Received After a Class Observation?

I’m hoping to draw on the collective wisdom of my wise and worldly readers, especially those who teach or have taught.

What’s the most useful feedback you ever received after a class observation? I’m thinking here especially of feedback from chairs or deans, but honestly, feedback from students counts, too. And I’m looking for most useful, as opposed to most flattering or most annoying.

Mine came at DeVry, of all places. I taught several different gen ed classes there. The gen ed classes there almost all met once a week for three hours, with a brief break in the middle. I had just come from grad school, where the lecture was king. The department chair sat in on the first half of a class a few weeks into the semester. I was acutely aware of it as a performance, so I fell back on some of my greatest hits. Later, when we met to discuss it, she mentioned -- in the nicest possible way -- that I needed to get the students actually doing things. Nobody could keep up that pace, and it wouldn’t help much even if someone could. The point was to help the students get better, which required stepping back and giving them room to work.

She was right. I hadn’t really put it together like that until she connected the dots for me. I had been so focused on the right words, the right jokes and the right energy level that I lost sight of the basic truth that it’s about the students. No matter how clever I was being, or thought I was being, none of it mattered if the students didn’t engage. I started spending less time on showmanship and more time on the architecture of the class. It made a tremendous difference.

Rather than offering a thumbs-up or -down, she offered a concrete suggestion for improvement. It was about tactics rather than ability. That was a drastic change from the model of teaching to which I had been subjected in grad school. My students benefited from the suggestion.

When I started doing observations of other people, I tried to keep that spirit in mind. Assuming the class wasn’t a train wreck -- which have been mercifully few and far between -- the point was to offer something the instructor could use to be more effective.

It didn’t always work, of course. Some suggestions just didn’t fit someone’s style or philosophy, which is fair enough. And some professors were so remarkably good that all I could do was express gratitude that I had the chance to see them in action. I’ve had the experience repeatedly of walking out of a classroom feeling embarrassed that I was supposed to judge someone who was so much better at teaching than I was. It’s the same feeling I get as a writer when I read someone like Tressie McMillan Cottom: her work is at such a level that even jealousy would be beside the point. I just feel lucky to have had the chance to read it at all.

But variations on “that was awesome!” aren’t actually all that helpful. An occasional well-placed concrete suggestion can do far more good. For instance, my brother offered a piece of writing advice that helps whenever I remember to use it: “death to adverbs!” It’s short, simple, practical and relevant.

Still, the true usefulness of feedback is only knowable by the one who receives it. So, wise and worldly readers, what’s the most useful teaching feedback you’ve received?