You can push and prod people into something better than mediocrity, but you have to encourage excellence.
David Lammy
We’ve all experienced the dread and agony of formal lesson observations, haven’t we? We’ve sweated blood over our preparations, filled in inch thick lesson plans and obsessed over meaningless details in our presentations. Or is that just me?
A while back now I read something (I forget exactly what) by Phil Beadle which went along the lines of “Be brilliant and they’ll forgive you anything.” This nugget has rattled around in my stony heart ever since with the result that I’ve started to relax somewhat when I’m observed. But, I’m still an obsessive by nature and find it hard to resist staying up late the night before ‘tweaking’.
For sometime now I’ve felt unhappy about the process of lesson observations. It’s widely accepted that giving students a grade for their work gets in the way of them acting on feedback and actually learning something; most schools even have ‘comment only’ marking policies to enforce this very thing. So, why do we insist on grading lesson observations? Doesn’t this prevent teachers from learning too?
I fully understand the pressure on a school to compile databases on its teachers’ effectiveness and am sanguine about the reality that we all exist somewhere on spreadsheets as 1s, 2s and 3s: it’s just a fact of our (somewhat truncated) professional lives. But while I accept the inevitability of grading, there’s a very real danger that there’s not much point to lesson observations other than to add to the already groaning burden of teachers’ accountability. Unless, that is, the observation is developmental.
I try to make all my observations developmental. Instead of trying to decide if what I’m observing is any good or not, I focus on how my feedback might result in the teacher improving their teaching, and, like the canine pets of Russian behavioural psychologists, improving their students’ learning. I work on the assumption that if teachers are waiting to find out what grade I think their lesson is they won’t hear very much else. And as soon as I’ve told them, they’re either too relieved or devastated for any kind of developmental conversation.
At Clevedon School we have a healthy balance of judgmental and developmental observations. Every single teacher in the school has received a judgement so far this year and our spreadsheet is duly updated and kept in readiness in the event that the inspector should call. Whilst no system can ever be perfect, we’ve put some real thought into how we can take some of the pain out of the process and make observations valuable development for all. concerned.
Firstly, we wanted to get rid of all the time hanging about after an observation waiting to find out the result. Of course every effort is always made to see the teacher with 24 hours but even when this does happen the situation is cold. The lesson has happened and any opportunity for learning is diminished by time and distance. The other stone we wanted to shake out of the observation shoe was the fact that while we had to make a summative judgement of some sort, could the process not be, at least in some way, formative?
The result of all this cogitation has been christened, the Live Lesson Obs. Here’s the paper work we use:
The idea is, and this is a bit out on a limb, that the observer should actually speak to the teacher. And vice versa. As an observer you would run your finger down the proffered dishes available for each of the given courses and select a prompt for a conversation to have with the teacher being observed. This has a number of real advantages:
- There is an expectation that teachers have to let students get on with some work and give them strategies to cope constructively with being stuck.
- As a teacher, you get to explain your thinking to the observer as the lesson progresses. You can explain why particular students are doing particular things and why you may be deviating from the lovingly crafted plan you’ve given them. In my case, I take the opportunity to explain exactly why what the students are doing makes the lesson outstanding. In the same way that Ofsted’s judgements on schools’ effectiveness often come down to whether the head teacher is more assertive than the lead inspector, a successful observation comes down to the teacher’s ability to articulate why the lesson has been designed as it has and to point just how students are making progress.
- As an observer, you get to ask teachers why they have made particular decisions and (this bit’s my favourite part) you get to prompt them to make changes or suggest possible improves at the point of teaching. This makes the process truly formative. If I see something going wrong, I don’t have to just sit and watch as the train wreck unfolds; I can ask questions and offer advice that might improve students’ learning and the teacher’s teaching.
- As the feedback takes place during the lesson, there’s no need to go through that anxious wait to find out what the observer thought: for better or worse, you know.
Maybe you worry that this sort of process may be open to the abuse of incompetent observers? To a degree, any system of observation depends on the skill and integrity of the observer but another part of our observation process is that the observer becomes the observed. We usually operate in triads where the discussions between teachers are made transparent. Of course mistakes may still be made, but this should minimise them.
This makes the whole process of observations feel more like it’s being done with teachers than to them. Teachers feel empowered by being able to explain their thinking and observers get to check out their judgements by asking the teacher if what they’re interpretation of what they’re seeing is accurate.
None of this is unique or particularly innovative, but the effect can be magical. We’re all agreed that improving the quality of teachers is the key to improving standards and this has helped to turn what is often merely a laborious way of monitoring into a system rooted in professional development and growth. Having experienced both in the fairly recent past, I’m unequivocal about which I prefer.
Related posts
What’s the point of lesson observations?
Are teacher observations a waste of time?
Feedback: it’s better to receive than to give
Have you tried this? What happened? What do the students do whilst you are discussing the lesson with the teacher? Doesn’t it break the flow of the lesson?
I have done an observation where (by agreement) I take over at points where the teacher is struggling to model the way forward and I can see by using cameras/earpiece how you might be able to support a teacher during an observation but I’m not sure how discussing during the lesson obs would work in practise.
Yes – works very well. As an observer you have to be sensitive to ‘the flow of the lesson’ and makes sure that your conversations are unobtrusive. I jot down the questions I want to ask as they occur to me and ask the teacher at an opportune moment. As a teacher, I make a point of explaining to the observer what the students are doing and pointing out who is making progress, directing observers to look in particular books and speak to particular students.
Obviously, the discussions are fairly brief but it works really well from both points of view. Sometimes I’ve observed lessons where it’s just not possible to speak to the teacher without getting in the way – generally this is because things are not going well.
I like the sound of this. I’d have to write pages to communicate everything I’ve thought about in a lesson plan. Not a good use of time, but then a gamble if you don’t have a chance to explain something to the observer. how does this work with official number of observations though? assume these are extra to PM or SLT obs. Most colleagues are pairing up informally for voluntary lesson obs this year. It’s an ideal opportunity for us to discuss our thinking with peers in a more formative way.
I spent all day yesterday pulling together quotes from my literature review on exactly this topic. I am soooo with you on the comments-only feedback approach, bit like AfL for teachers. I am due to submit my essay in a couple of weeks, thanks for confirming my thinking 🙂
I like this idea!
A q though – how does this work in practice if the lesson is not good? E.g if itsnot going well and you give advice they apply it in the second half but still not good enough. How does this go diwn with observed? Did staff have reservations about it at first and what do they think now? Do you do thus in 30mins and 1hr obs?
Of course you need to be sensitive – if a lesson is going badly that is usually obvious quite quickly. Sometime you can suggest tweaks, sometime you have to let it run its course and talk later.
Staff did have reservations at first but are now almost unanimously in favour.
Almost all of our obs are either for a full lesson or less than 15 mins.
Thanks, D
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[…] made the point that observation should focus on students rather than teachers. By the time I wrote Live lesson obs – making lesson observations formative in February 2013 I thought I had the answer. But the following posts dwelt on the continuing […]