Making observations useful
Every year, and more often in some schools, teachers are observed by someone who manages them in what can feel like a sort of ritual. The teacher is informed, plans more than they might have done, tries activities they feel the observer wants to see, maybe marks the books more than they would have done otherwise. The meeting after can be informative and interesting but it’s often hard to escape the feeling of everything being one-way: the objective all-seing expert informing the teacher what really happened and what they need to do to improve.
I enjoyed listening to Dylan William being interviewed on Craig Barton’s podcast. He highlighted some of the pitfalls of observation being used to evaluate teacher performance:
- That observations by 5 observers of the same teacher with 6 different classes would be needed to get anything close to an accurate assessment.
- That different models of teacher evaluation can place teachers into completely different categories.
- That the furthest we can get to confident judgements is knowing that those teachers we have assessed as being in the top 20% are not in the bottom 20%.
A solution he offers is to empower teachers to be the owners of their own development. Given the inherent problems of trying to evaluate lessons objectively teachers can be asked what they want to work on and observation(s) can focus on that. This makes follow up conversations less about judgement and more about pedagogy. At one point in the interview William suggests that where the teacher is in terms of professional development at the time of the observation is not important. What matters is the will to change and a goal with an observation aiming to work on it.
To go even further I have been thinking about a project I worked on in Camden on Lesson Study. There are a variety of models and ways of working but essentially a group of teachers plan together and observe each other with similar groups, tweaking the plan based on the prior observations.
My thinking is that this could replace formal evaluative lesson observations, with staff groups conjecturing, investigating and evaluating strategies and initiatives. Teachers could then write about it and share with staff about their findings so far. These write-ups could be centralised and accessible to others and could serve as starting points for subsequent investigation.
This is getting far from the current model but it strikes me that there is something here that could serve to inspire and engage teachers in ways that may not be possible. Empowering teachers to reflect on their practice and inspiring them to want to improve must be desirable to all schools, perhaps this might offer ways in which this can be done.
