Utter the acronym “PD” to teachers and you’ll get all sorts of reactions. Sadly, many of those reactions will involve grimaces and deep sighs. It’s unfortunate professional development gets a bad rap, since every teacher I know truly longs to increase their expertise and build confidence in their practice.
At my university, I have the pleasure of working with new educators as they navigate the roller coaster ride that is their first year of teaching. In our new-teacher induction program, instructors meet with our recent graduates monthly and talk through issues that they are experiencing in their classrooms. We make our meetings a safe space for them to talk through their challenges—communicating with parents, formative assessments, cultural fluency, teacher stress—and celebrate their successes. My colleagues and I jokingly call it our new-teacher therapy.
One thing we talk about at our meetings is what type of professional development they are receiving in their schools and how they feel it is working. The PD experiences they share are the ones one would expect to hear: staff meetings, professional learning communities, an occasional book study, a new-teacher mentor pairing. When asked how effective their PD is, the new teachers often respond “meh” or “I guess this is just the way it is.”
In this biweekly column, principals and other authorities on school leadership—including researchers, education professors, district administrators, and assistant principals—offer timely and timeless advice for their peers.
But some of the most important conversations we have are regarding what type of PD they feel is most helpful to them. Two years ago, we surveyed our pilot group of 20 new teachers with that very question, “What PD is the most helpful for you?” We purposely asked them this as an open-ended question with no multiple-choice lists to see what they would say without being prompted. Fifteen of the 20 teachers said their No. 1 most helpful professional growth opportunity was watching their peers teach.
Researchers know that a 75 percent survey-response rate is pretty significant. But then, something even more interesting happened to that percentage. We came back together as a group to discuss the “why” behind their survey answers. After the teachers went around the room and shared their responses, all five of the other teachers requested to change their answers; they hadn’t considered peer observations as PD. In the end, 100 percent of our 20 new teachers shared that they learned the most by far from watching other teachers teach.
But even more interesting, more than half the teachers in the group had not even been offered the opportunity to visit the classrooms of their colleagues as a PD opportunity. We spent much time discussing how to approach their administration to ask for the opportunity to observe other teachers, but many new teachers were nervous about asking their principals to do that.
While this is of course a small sample size, there is ample research documenting the effectiveness of peer observations more broadly. So the question becomes, why are we not creating opportunities for peer observations in our schools on a regular basis? There is a long list of pros and not very many cons for the practice.
- Time: Finding one period or class time to observe is much easier than taking a whole day to attend an off-site PD event.
- Relevance: When possible, seeing another teacher in action with the same student population and similar content areas or grade levels allows for more targeted learning.
- Connections: Allowing teachers the opportunity to visit each other’s classrooms helps them to make connections with one another and develop deeper, more meaningful relationships.
- Cost: Peer observations are, for the most part, free. The one cost incurred might be finding a sub for a period, but compared with other PD options, this cost is negligible.
- Low pressure: When teachers visit each other’s classrooms, there is no stress about being formally evaluated or judged in an evaluative way. The experience is between them and them only, and the ideas and advice they share come from a place of collaboration and collegiality.
Implementing a system for teachers to observe their colleagues’ classrooms is one of the best ways to help teachers grow, and it’s not only for new teachers. Veteran teachers can benefit, too. As they see their peers using different approaches, they can learn new strategies to spice up their lessons.
As far as bang-for-your-buck, you can’t get much more return on investment than having a system in place for teachers to watch and learn from each other. School leaders have an opportunity to transform professional development from something teachers dread into something they genuinely value. The evidence is clear: Teachers are eager to learn from their peers in real classroom settings.
It’s time to move beyond traditional PD models and recognize what teachers themselves are telling us works best. Rather than waiting for teachers to request peer-observation opportunities, administrators should proactively build these experiences into their school’s professional development framework. When we remove barriers and create real, meaningful ways for teachers to learn from one another, we not only improve individual teaching practice but also strengthen the collaborative culture of our schools.
The question isn’t whether peer observations work; we know they do. The real question is: What steps will you take to make them an integral part of your school’s professional growth strategy?
