The walkthrough is not the leadership move. The five to ten minutes right after it is, and most principals spend less time planning that conversation than they spent writing the form.
I have sat in on enough post-observation conversations to see the same pattern. A principal opens a laptop, reads back what they wrote, and asks if the teacher has any questions. The teacher says no. Both people leave the room having completed a step, and neither one has changed anything about next week's lesson.
Why the conversation gets skipped
It gets skipped because the walkthrough itself feels like the work. It has a form, a timestamp, and a rubric, so it produces something a principal can point to. The conversation afterward produces nothing you can file, and on a day with six more walkthroughs scheduled, the thing with no artifact is the thing that gets compressed into a hallway exchange.
That trade looks efficient and it is not. A visit with no real conversation after it is data collection. It tells you what happened. It does nothing to change what happens next, and student learning is what a principal is actually accountable for, on campus and on the exam.
Open with what you saw, not what you concluded
The conversation goes sideways in the first sentence more often than anywhere else. "Your questioning wasn't very rigorous" is a verdict, and a teacher's first move against a verdict is to defend it. "I counted four questions in twenty minutes, and all four had a single correct answer" is a fact. A teacher can look at a fact next to you instead of defending against you.
This matters more with a strong, experienced teacher than with a struggling one, because an experienced teacher has heard enough vague feedback to distrust it on sight. Specific evidence is the only thing that gets past that.
Let the teacher do the reasoning
The second mistake is supplying the diagnosis. It is faster to just say what you saw and what you think it means, and faster is exactly the problem. A teacher who is handed the conclusion can accept it, nod, and change nothing, because agreeing with a diagnosis takes no ownership of it.
Ask instead. "What did you notice about who was talking during that stretch?" takes longer to get to the same place, and the teacher who arrives there themselves is the one who actually tries the fix the following week. This is the harder version of the conversation to run, because silence while someone thinks feels like a conversation that stalled. It has not stalled. Let it sit.
Close with one change and a date to come back
A conversation that ends with a list of things to work on ends with nothing changing, because a list gives a busy teacher permission to pick none of it. Close with a single, specific instructional move, tried in a specific lesson, and a date you will be back to see it.
The return date is what separates coaching from a comment. Feedback with no follow-up is an opinion someone once had about your class. Feedback with a scheduled return visit is a commitment two people made to each other, and it is the difference a teacher can feel.
Why this sits across two domains on the 268
This work lives in Domain II because it is instructional leadership, and it lives in Domain III because growing the person in front of you, not just the lesson in front of you, is human capital work. A stem built around a post-observation conversation is usually testing whether you can tell the difference between an option that manages the process and an option that moves the teacher's practice and the teacher's ownership of it.
The weighting for both domains is on the 268 boot camp page, and I wrote more about why leadership means the work after the walkthrough, not the walkthrough itself, in instructional leadership is not observation.
What this means if you are studying
Practice reading a stem for where the "leadership" actually is. If four options all sound like something a real principal might do, the one closest to specific evidence and the teacher's own reasoning is usually the one the framework rewards, and the ones that stop at scheduling, forms, or deferral are usually the distractors.
A lot of the teachers sitting across from you in that conversation started somewhere else in the building. If you are building that pipeline earlier than the classroom door, ParaReady is where paraprofessionals working toward a classroom of their own get their start, and the feedback habits that matter later start being built there.
If you want to see how this kind of scenario is taught in full, the free seven-day trial opens the strategy module with Christie Ray, who has run this exact conversation more times than either of us can count.