High School English Teachers Reflect on Their Talk: A Study of Response to Automated Feedback with the Teacher Talk Tool

We present the Teacher Talk Tool, which automatically analyzes classroom audio and provides formative feedback on key aspects of teachers’ classroom discourse (e.g., use of open-ended questions). The tool was designed to promote teacher learning by focusing attention and sense-making on their discourse. We conducted a feedback-response study where five English & Language Art teachers used the Teacher Talk Tool in eight classroom sessions. Teachers completed repeated-measure surveys and semi-structured interviews providing quantitative and qualitative evidence of feedback response. Results indicated that the majority of automated feedback was perceived to be accurate and prompted a high degree of reflection, focusing teachers’ attention on the measured talk constructs. This feedback also led teachers to engage in a process of sense-making, linking the measured talk features to classroom processes and contexts. However, evidence of feedback uptake was more limited. Overall, results contribute to the nascent literature on the efficacy of automated feedback on instructional practice.