Whetstone Education Announces Lesson Plan Feedback Capability
K-12’s first online lesson planning collaboration capability
Whetstone Education, a leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology company and creator of the Whetstone classroom observation and instructional coaching platform, today announced the release of the Lesson Plan Feedback feature, a first-to-market capability that enables lesson planning collaboration between teachers and coaches, turning a historically one-way, passive instructional planning activity into a collaborative, iterative partnership.
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“COVID shifted everything, including classroom instruction. During asynchronous instruction in the spring, we noticed our school leaders shifting the way they gave feedback — rather than giving feedback after a lesson, they started giving feedback before the lesson,” says Libby Fischer, Whetstone CEO. “What all of us realized pretty quickly was that shifting feedback to lesson plans was not a limitation, but rather an advantage. It was a lightbulb moment: the better the content and planning before the lesson, the stronger the instructional delivery will be.”
Lesson planning is a crucial piece of instructional effectiveness and many K-12 school leaders require lesson plans be reviewed and approved before being delivered to students. Until now, there has been no way to easily manage and track this collaboration. Whetstone’s newest, and first-of-its-kind feature, transforms the lesson plan approval process by expanding it from a compliance-based activity to a collaborative coaching one. Enabling this collaboration to happen asynchronously in the Whetstone platform gives school leaders a bird’s eye view of the work going on in their school.
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Even pre-COVID, innovative instructional leaders were starting to include lesson plan feedback as a part of their instructional coaching arsenal. Seeing how our leaders adapted their use of Whetstone during COVID gave us the user insights we needed to build something that will really make life easier for our coaches.
“At Whetstone, we are committed to innovation that supports improving teaching and learning,” says Fischer. “Lesson Plan Feedback, fully integrated into Whetstone, provides one location where observation, feedback, coaching, and lesson planning can happen in one place, and that is a big win for K-12.”