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Guidelines
Participation in a structured process of professional collaboration like this can be intimidating and anxiety producing, especially for the teacher presenting student work. Having a shared set of guidelines or norms helps everybody participate in a manner that is respectful as well as conducive to helpful feedback. Below is one set of guidelines; teachers may want to create their own. In any case, the group should go over the guidelines and the schedule before starting the protocol. The facilitator must feel free to remind participants of the guidelines and schedule at any time in the process.
1. Be respectful of presenters. By making their work more public, teachers are exposing themselves to kinds of critiques they may not be used to receiving. If inappropriate comments or questions are posed, the facilitator should make sure they are blocked or withdrawn.
2. Contribute to substantive discourse. Resist offering only blanket praise or silence. Without thoughtful, probing questions and comments, the presenter will not benefit from the tuning protocol.
3. Be appreciative of the facilitator’s role, particularly in regard to following the norms and keeping time. A tuning protocol that doesn’t allow for all components (presentation, feedback, response, debrief) to be enacted properly will do a disservice to the teacher-presenters and to the participants.
4. Facilitators need to keep the conversation constructive. There is a delicate balance between feedback that only strokes and feedback that does damage. It is the facilitator’s job to make sure that balance is maintained. At the end of the session, the presenter should be able to revise the work productively on the basis of what was said.
5. Don’t skip the debrief. It is tempting to move to the next item of business once the feedback section is over. If you do that, the quality of responses will not improve and the presenters will not get increasingly useful kinds of feedback.