On Instructional Improvement: A Modest Essay

Abstract

If we say we ‘deliver feedback to teachers,’ we most likely subscribe to a traditional approach to instructional improvement. In this approach the principal or supervisor treats the teacher as passive recipient who is expected to act on feedback that is too generic to be useful, and promotes a simplistic view of teaching and its improvement. In this essay I examine instructional improvement, a vague and taken-for-granted concept. I then identify what complicates our thinking about it, pose two competing approaches, and acknowledge our challenges. The essay concludes with a call to focus on teacher learning, if supervision scholars profess instructional improvement as our common purpose.