Judgementoring

The ‘sandwich’ approach

When I first starting working as a teacher educator, back in 2014, I drew on the ubiquitous post-lesson observation feedback format, the so called ‘sandwich approach’ (Schwarz, 2013). In the sandwich approach, the observer first provides some overall positive feedback on the lesson, before moving onto what they feel didn’t work, and rounding off the discussion with a few more positive comments. Positive-negative-positive, it’s no wonder this sandwich ended up being referred to as the s**t sandwich.

The whole ‘sandwich’ performance felt very unnatural — staged and hurtful for the receiver. No matter how tactfully I felt I phrased my criticism, it was criticism nonetheless and my student teachers without exception took it personally, as an attack on their work and, by extension, on themselves.

So, instead of creating conditions conducive to student teacher learning, my sandwiched approach achieved the exact opposite: it put my students in defence mode, which meant that they focused all their efforts on protecting their integrity, rather than keeping their minds open to new learning. My approach blocked learning instead of promoting it.

The ‘positive’ overture and finish appeared to wash over their heads completely: over time, they had become aware of the structure of the sandwich discussion and ignored the first bit of positivity because they were psyching themselves up for the negativity to come; after experiencing the negativity, they didn’t have any headspace the final bit of positivity, so that, too, didn’t seem to get noticed much. The whole thing was a mess and did not work — for them, or for me.

Judgementoring and an alternative

It was a relief to learn that the protocol I cringed at had a name, and not a very good one — Hobson and Malderez (2013: 90) talked about it as a harmful practice of ‘judgementoring’ , i.e.:

a one to one relationship between a relatively inexperienced teacher (the mentee) and a relatively experienced one (the mentor) in which the latter, in revealing too readily and/or too often her/his own judgements on or evaluations of the mentee’s planning and teaching […] compromises the mentoring relationship and its potential benefits.

Malderez proposed an alternative protocol called Systematic Informed Reflective Practice (SIRP) (Malderez and Wedell, 2007; Malderez, 2015 and, in more detail, Malderez, 2023), in which the role of the mentor is to merely facilitate the mentee’s reflection, helping them arrive at their own, informed judgements, and getting involved if and when invited by the mentee.

After lengthy discussions with Malderez about SIRP, which included some resistance on my part (e.g. How do you mean I am not supposed to occasionally praise or criticise my students’ work?) I started using the protocol with small groups of student teachers. This was an enlightening experience — I was no longer expected to provide ‘negative feedback’ (phew!). It was not all plain sailing, though: there was the challenge of turning my voice down (and keeping quiet doesn’t come easy to all teachers!) to leave more room for my students’ autonomous explorations of, and learning from their own teaching. Of course, I was there to support them if they needed a pointer (e.g. an idea, a suggestion for a theoretical tool to help them understand a classroom situation), but it was them leading the way and me following in. It was supporting, rather than imposing. It was liberating.

Judgementoring and the Noticing app

Humans can be difficult to teach to hold off judgement (and hold back more generally, especially when they are teachers who just like to talk!) and/or to come up readily with theoretical constructs relevant to the post-lesson observation discussion. Training AI is arguably less complex.

While it has been difficult to ‘teach’ a GPT to talk less (perhaps due to internet "content" i.e. wordy blogs being a very common style of the language it was trained on), it was certainly not difficult to train it to hold off judgement. Using the app myself, I feel very safe to explore teaching situations that may have made me uncomfortable, knowing that I won’t be judged or lectured in the process. This facilitates emotional offloading and results in feelings of calm and closure at the end of a mentorial . I am also safe in the knowledge that no one will have no access to my mentorials unless I specifically choose to share. This makes Noticing a safe space to be in, explore, come up with ideas that might not have been available in a non-dialogic format and make plans for alternative actions next time I’m in a similar situation. Sustained reflective practice, in turn, supports me to notice more and better — as Mason (2002) puts it ‘noticing begets noticing’.

References:

1. Hobson, A. & Malderez, A. (2013). Judgementoring and other threats to realizing the potential of school-based mentoring in teacher education. International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, 2(2), 89-108.
2. Mason, J. (2002). Researching your own practice: The discipline of noticing. New York: Routledge.
3. Schwarz, R., (2013). ‘The “Sandwich Approach” Undermines your Feedback’. Harvard Business Review, 19 April 2013. Available at: https://hbr.org/2013/04/the-sandwich-approach-undermi