David Rushby is the co-creator of Nautilus, an online school leadership platform that enables schools to accurately self-evaluate their provision using an iPad or tablet. He’s proud to have a career that began as a special educational teaching assistant, before teaching in a large inner-city school in Hackney, east London. David then went on to become a long-serving headteacher, with a proven record of successfully leading large schools in challenging circumstances. David now works with over 600 schools globally, as well as being a school improvement advisor for the local education authority.
After welcoming the pupils into school, settling in, and rolling out your priorities, how do you then seek to secure genuine improvement in your classrooms?
So many of our approaches to school improvement are back to front, and we know it. Test and assessment analysis may be good for targeting teaching, but we know that this doesn’t improve the skillset of our team, or typically inform professional development. This leaves us with our appraisals, ‘observations,’ and monitoring. These can be labor-intensive, skewed, standalone activities, that can also have little impact on genuine professional development if we’re not careful. Lesson observations are often rooted in appraisals, performance, pay, career progression, accountability, or even compliance. We may well seek to rebrand or reframe them, but we can probably agree that they are unavoidable. Stating that you’ll now be doing drop-in visits instead of observations, is pretty much like saying that you prefer hiking to walking. I often think that you’d be better off asking the staff to put their hand up in the staff room, tell you what they teach well and what they teach less well, if you want genuine, no-nonsense improvement. If we can just get our professional development right, then surely the outcomes will take care of themselves?
This is the term where we begin to measure impact in the classrooms. In this article, I’d like to share some ideas that can enable you to step back and rework your lesson observations. Here are 5 key areas to consider if you’d like to prioritize growth and put your faith in your people.
1. Set the Expectation
It’s good to state what the clear purpose of any lesson observation may be. I would start by being explicit in making the distinction between evaluating curriculum impact and judging teachers. If we can talk about outcomes, effectiveness, impact, and value, then we can move away from a more personal pass or fail process. The shared language that we use is significant when ensuring that your team is in a safe place when you visit, or when they visit each other, which is critical for accuracy. There may be times when you have to focus on competence or quick turnaround approaches, but these are exceptional, and not the same as establishing your wider, ongoing professional development.
2, Create the Right Conditions
If this is going to involve others and also simultaneously develop distributed leadership, then it’s important to make sure that this process can be a good fit for everyone. After all, not all observations, visits, and monitoring will be performed by line managers. If your team is going to collectively evaluate their subject and aspect areas, then we need to recognize that this is definitely not about ‘performance.’ We can then seek to prioritize feedback, advice, ideas, and dialogue. What we want to ensure is that when the classroom door opens, the teacher will perceive this to be a useful, collaborative, and developmental process, whilst contributing to a wider school improvement agenda.
3. Consistency
Along with transparency, it’s a good idea to offer guidance. This is all about the frameworks and proformas that you design to provide your common language. I’d love to say that we’ll be using a blank piece of paper, but in all honesty, this may not help to support distributed leadership. I think that identifying simple lines of enquiry with prompts to guide can be enough. This is something that we’ve spent hours developing with our leadership platform, distilling the key areas and losing any content that inadvertently tells teachers how to teach. By doing this, we recognize that teachers may use different strategies while we focus on evaluating effectiveness. With lines of enquiry, we can nudge and steer so that the key areas are explicit, without using a checklist of uniform expectations or descriptors.
4. Lighter Touch
It’s both interesting and unhelpful how the humble lesson observation can become hijacked by skewed measures of accountability, numerical thresholds, and targets. But all is not lost, observations are often redefined as lesson visits, learning walks, or drop-ins. To be honest, you can use whatever title you prefer, as long as your team understands what it is, and more importantly, what it’s for. Ultimately, as soon as you enter a classroom for the purpose of evaluation, you’re observing.
One thing about moving from more formal lesson observations to shorter, lighter-touch visits is that we can increase accuracy. When we enter the classroom, it should always be business as usual. Only if the observation is accurate, will the feedback be meaningful. The alternative to accuracy is a ‘fireworks lesson,’ and this is a game that I’ve previously played for years. If I enter the classroom and the teacher is dressed as Henry VIII, I can probably assume that it’s not typical, that this may well be an exceptional lesson, and that they may be worried that they need to prove their competence to me. When it’s really not about me.
I also think that it’s entirely possible to keep the visit short, between 10 and 15 minutes, if you have the right lines of enquiry. Utilizing what you already know, building a picture, developing your relationship, learning more and more about your colleagues over time.
5. Create Professional Dialogue
If this is going to be more of a process than an event, then we’re not creating standalone targets or objectives. This is more about rolling professional dialogue, which can support improvement throughout the year. Identifying areas for development, sharing ideas and strategies can all help to improve teaching by tweaking, developing, and strengthening. If this whole process is going to work, your feedback needs to be as efficient as your lesson visit. A short, concise observation framework will provide a short and manageable follow-up conversation. Let’s not forget that most teaching is already good, and not about competency, but inherently inconsistent across subject areas, programs of study, or year groups. Therefore, it has to be alright to agree that it’s perfectly fair to be better at teaching some subjects, areas of study, or year groups than others, in the interests of genuine, developmental feedback.
Let’s conclude with a win/win. The infinite pursuit of school improvement does not need to conflict with teacher job satisfaction, when it could be an integral driver in creating a school where your staff can feel rewarded and love coming to work every day. This process should contribute to securing a healthy and productive school culture. Lesson observations can be a highly effective way to establish unity and purpose. There’s a vulnerability about it which can cement relations between colleagues. It should be a personal experience for the teacher and a privilege for the observer, with the opportunity to look a colleague in the eye and tell them exactly what you like about what they do. From my experience, it there’s one thing that all teachers thrive on, it’s recognition. Recognition from parents, pupils, colleagues and you. And here’s your cue.
Seek to prioritise recognition. Seek ensure that every teacher can leave school every day feeling skilled, positive, effective, and valued, and let ‘performance,’ pupil progress, test scores, career progression, and school improvement, become the super-charged by-products of what you do.