The use of keywords for delevering immediate performance feedback on teacher competence development

Literature shows that feedback that is specific, immediate and goal-oriented is effective on (pre-service) teachers’ performance. Synchronous coaching gives this kind of feedback. Due to immediateness of feedback, pre-service teachers can suffer from cognitive load. We propose a set of standardised keywords through which this performance feedback can be delivered – each keyword acts as a summary for the feedback message. The construction and the selection of the keywords is aimed at the reduction of message ambiguity, while at the same time a low level of cognitive load on the pre-service teacher must be maintained. An in vivo pilot-study with 40 respondents (pre-service teachers and their coaches) supported our hypothesis that usage of such sets of standardised keywords will mitigate the levels of ambiguity and cognitive load. These findings and other considerations for additional research using immediate performance are addressed.