Schema Shaping in Schools: How Feedback Redefines Reality

Recently, I was watching a cooking show where chefs compete against each other to build a dish under timed conditions. One competitor was technically skilled but messy—she kept throwing her unused scraps on the floor, dirtying the kitchen space. One of the judges, restaurateur Jeffrey Zakarian, delivered a scathing critique.

He not only faulted her dish but also her approach to cooking as a whole. It was undisciplined, unrefined, and showed disrespect for the kitchen, he said.

In this moment, I saw my work with teachers reflected back at me: How we execute the nuances of teaching—the small planning moves that bolster practitioner preparedness, the quiet asides when correcting a student—define our outcomes.

So, how was the Zakarian’s critique received?

As I coach, I was expecting the competitor to shut down and produce something lower quality in the next round. I was completely wrong. The chef, instead, doubled down and produced her best dish the next round, and the cooking was cleaner, neater, and executed with greater care and respect.

This episode elucidated for me a key thing I’ve learned from my work in schools: A leader’s feedback is incredibly powerful and has the ability to shape future behavior in ways a practitioner cannot do alone.

Shaping Performance Through Feedback

Individuals construct meaning from their experience by creating mental models that allow us to interpret the world. Another term for these models is schema. These schemas help us define and categorize multitudes of input in a classroom, helping us evaluate our effectiveness.

Feedback communicates the finer points of expectation. The leader’s words modify the receiver’s mental model of the world. I have seen a teacher’s performance change dramatically after a principal challenges them with effective feedback. Saying something like “not good enough” might sting in the moment but in the long run signals esteem: This feedback changes the teacher’s previous ideas of how they are doing, reorienting them to a higher bar. A practitioner’s development is shaped by an interplay between their daily experience and evolving self-perception.

Over time, with effective feedback, a practitioner’s schema is refined and internalized. At this point, self-critique can be just as powerful as leader feedback. Research also bears this out.

The Sharpest Tool

Education researcher John Hattie found that well-executed feedback is one of the most effective interventions to improve student performance. In a meta-analysis of over 800 studies, he found that effective feedback doesn’t just evaluate but it also points a way forward.

This makes sense. Students and practitioners arrive with a performance level defined by what they know and their current internal schema. To help them improve, we must both teach them new content and reshape how they see the world and how they define success, interpret behavior, and value aesthetics and justice. Feedback has this ability.

The potential to affect change through feedback is clear, but is all feedback equal? Do all who give feedback have the same impact?

Leaders Beware: Your Words Have Power

The leader’s opinion can have a destabilizing, even disorienting, effect. Reality in schools is a co-created thing. In positions of power, our voices can disrupt others’ sense of reality and cause them to feel dissonance, thinking, I thought I was doing well, but I guess not. Maybe my view of the world is off.

Feedback allows for “reality norming”—helping someone understand how what was seen, done, or said fits into the larger vision for excellence in the space. An offhanded comment during a lesson might register to a school leader as disinvesting for students but go unnoticed by the teacher. Feedback can then highlight a previously invisible practice and point the way forward for improvement. The right bit of data, a description of the impact, changes how the teacher sees their work.

In my work as a coach, I often needed to point out how sarcasm can break relationships with teenagers. Missing the often complex subtext of sarcasm, some teenagers take what is a normal adult socializing mechanism and interpret it as a slight. Before pointing it out, the adult might not realize the impact of their words, but after targeted feedback, they reviewed what they say in class with a more discerning eye.

Carol Dweck’s work gives weight to this assertion that the reality we create in our mind influences our outcomes. In her studies on mindset, she found that giving feedback that implies mental malleability and potential led to greater learning.

Building on her work, we must ensure that our feedback is rich in clarity, helpful and rooted in the fundamental belief that people can grow.

Relationships as Conduit for Feedback

The work of Anthony Bryk posits that one-way trust can be defined is as a moral resource. This jibes with Amy Edmondson’s idea of psychological safety.

By deploying trust, you are tapping into a shared moral structure. Shared understanding establishes the psychological safety required to take risks, which is critical for learning and growth.

Thus, relationships can both be established by good feedback, honing the receiver’s internal schema, as well as amplified by it.

Praise and Critique: Best Practices for Constructive Feedback

Critical feedback has great potential for growth, but it can also be destabilizing and disinvesting, especially if effort goes unrecognized. If you are putting forth immense effort but receiving only negativity, it might be easiest (one might even say safest) to shut down the whole endeavor.

I’ve found that critical feedback, if embedded in a reflective framework that embraces a growth mindset, can aid in meaning making rather than being detrimental. When delivered as an objective observation followed by practical advice for improvement, the leader allows the receiver to make their own meaning while subtly messaging: I know you can do better.

Just as critique can illuminate gaps, praise can equally shine a spotlight on the key levers of excellence in the classroom. It can also hinder development if deployed inappropriately.

There are hundreds of things we could care about in the classroom. Targeted praise heightens the salience of the key levers of success, drawing attention to what matters most.

Broad praise is often ineffective because it reinforces a fixed mindset. If key actions are not highlighted, the learner risks interpreting the praise as “I’m great.” This reinforces all parts of their internal structure equally and doesn’t present any challenge.

Narrow praise, in contrast, isolates signal from noise. By highlighting a particular part of what a teacher does, targeted praise makes the highlighted behavior more likely to be recognized as positive and repeated. This type of feedback puts emphasis on one component of the receiver’s mental diagram of what they did, strengthening that part over others, and priming the receiver for further development.

Whether commenting on how a teacher sped the lesson up to match the excitement of their students or pointing out when they dug deeper into a student misunderstanding, targeted praise can take a fleeting moment of brilliance and amplify it into a consistently effective habit.

Targeted praise is the full realization and application of Dweck’s growth mindset. Good actions shine as other parts of one’s practice lay in dark relief, gesturing towards what more is possible.

Forward-Focused Feedback

Returning to the cooking show, I wonder what the impact would have been if Zakarian had used a softer approach or formulaic strategy. I bet it wouldn’t have landed as well or changed the contestant behavior so radically.

One reason why this other approach wouldn’t have been as successful is because it is less honest. It doesn’t convey the depth of critique or the strongly held belief that she was capable of more. Deliberately, his feedback brought the contestant into his reality, a reality where all chefs had respect for the craft.

When I think about when I’ve grown the most, it is after my expectations were dashed, but my potential was shown.

Whether we are acting as a leader in a building or the leader at the front of the classroom, giving good feedback is a deeply human act. It conveys two beliefs: belief in the capability of the person in front of them, and a belief in a shared view of reality. It both reinforces and creates culture anew. It can connect us just as it can destroy us, and so feedback must be used judiciously, like a scalpel rather than a mallet.

Feedback is about shaping the people who have entrusted us to lead, to enact vital change in the classroom. Our work is the work of building minds. It matters more than almost anything else we do. We must do it at a high level in a way that allows those we lead to become the effective practitioners our world demands.

Nicholas Schmidt is an adjunct professor at St. Xavier University in Chicago.