Want to Know the 'Why' Behind a Teacher's Practice? Ask 'How' Instead
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder shares a powerful reframe for instructional leaders: asking 'how' questions elicits more honest and useful information than asking 'why.'
Key Takeaways
- 'Why' puts people on the defensive - Asking why a teacher made a choice can feel like an interrogation
- 'How' invites explanation - 'How did you decide to...' opens a genuine professional conversation
- Better questions produce better conversations - The quality of post-observation dialogue depends heavily on how questions are framed
Transcript
In a feedback conversation with a teacher, you're often going to want to explore the teacher's thinking and get some insight into why they made the decisions they made.
But if you ask why directly, you're more likely to trigger defensiveness and get a justification rather than an explanation.
So a really easy change you can make is instead of asking a why question, ask a how question.
How did you decide how to group students for that activity?
Or how did you decide whether to work another example or move on?
Now, a good format for doing that is to share some evidence.
And you can see in these questions, there's a little bracket where you can include some evidence.
And then you can ask a question about that piece of evidence.
So if you want to get these questions for evidence-based feedback from my book and get the note card template that you can download and fill out one note card per teacher, go to principalcenter.com slash index.