Imagine you’re going about your day as a teacher: You’re halfway through your lesson plan, you’re defusing tensions between students, while also trying to focus on kids who need extra help. It might seem like it’s chaos, but it’s controlled.
Suddenly, your principal “pops in” to observe your class.
It’s a common—and dreaded—scenario. Teachers don’t like observations or pop-ins that have an element of surprise to them. They also don’t particularly like the planned, official check-ins that principals do with a rubric and rulebook in hand. About half a dozen teachers told Education Week that they struggle with the idea of being judged based on 20-minute slices of their days, especially since those observations can affect their performance evaluations.
“Even if you thought the lesson was beautiful, and you planned it so much, and practiced it, … maybe you had done it before with other classes with great success, [but] there was just always something negative to say,” by administrators, said Marie Ziskin, a former elementary STEM teacher from Corona, N.Y, who recently left teaching to work for a private firm.
Walkthroughs and observations are an integral part of principals’ instructional leadership role. But most teachers look at them as a compliance mechanism, instead of a supportive one, said Susan Moore Johnson, an education professor at the Harvard School of Graduate Education.
“The idea of instructional leadership is meaningful if the principals are good and well informed and effective teachers on their own,” she said. “If they are responding to either their own or central administrators’ top-down expectations for conformity, then teachers tend to see that as an interruption, even if the principal doesn’t speak.”
Johnson, who’s researched teacher effectiveness, said it is important for principals to create a culture where they listen to teachers’ needs and provide constructive feedback. Principals should consider themselves part of the team, Johnson said, instead of acting as “tightly scripted managers.”
This collaborative culture can put teachers at ease when they are being observed. “That’s very different than feeling like my job or my reputation is on the line,” Johnson added.
For busy principals, it’s a hard balance
Ideally, there should be a difference between popping in to observe a class and give feedback and conducting formal observations that go in teachers’ evaluations. This is especially true when teachers are implementing a new curriculum—walkthroughs, observations, and constant feedback are at the crux of training teachers to take up the new way of teaching.
“It would be more helpful if [principals] asked what we needed in such a new context, instead of telling us this is what we need to do,” said Andrea Plis, an English/language arts teacher from Athens, Ohio.
But a time crunch always gets in the way, said Eric Fox, the assistant principal of Jenks High School in Jenks, Okla. Evaluations are often reduced to “ticking boxes,” he said, instead of having meaningful and in-depth conversations with teachers about the support they need.
Teachers often feel the brunt of this time crunch. Several told Education Week that observations are nervewracking. And the checklist approach doesn’t always work in classrooms where teachers have to manage a range of student behaviors and learning challenges, they said.
Teachers said they are also frustrated when principals are too singularly focused with what’s on their observation checklist instead of taking in the whole picture.
“I had a student who had been having major behaviors for days before my evaluation, and the day of the evaluation, the kid came in, and I took three or four minutes to say, ‘Thank you so much for being here. I’ve missed you,’ and I got dinged [by the evaluator] because four minutes of instruction was lost,” said Melissa D., a teacher from Illinois who declined to share her last name because she wasn’t authorized by her school district to speak to the media.
Melissa has moved districts since then and said her current administration is more flexible and supportive when it comes to observations.
Principals should rely on a teams-based approach
Johnson said she’s sympathetic to the number of tasks that principals need to tend to in their buildings, leaving them with very little time to give comprehensive, regular feedback in both informal and formal observations. To ease this pressure, Johnson recommends that principals deploy a larger team of observers, including deans and instructional coaches, to help.
Teachers can be tapped, too. Johnson recommends creating grade-level groups of teachers who can observe each other’s classes and come together frequently to share their feedback. It’s especially helpful when the teachers teach the same cohorts of students and can work together to meet their academic and emotional needs, she said.
The peer observation model can also make newer teachers feel less isolated and more prepared when an administrator comes in for a formal evaluation, Johnson added.
But like any other tool, peer observations will only be effective if the teachers involved have built trust with each other, said Fox, the assistant principal. Otherwise, these observations, too, could feel like “gotcha” moments.
Fox, who’s been an educator at Jenks High since 1995, said it’s easier to do walkthroughs and offer feedback when he has a prior relationship with teachers. With teachers he knows well, Fox said he can have a quick chat in the hallway after a walkthrough to discuss how the class went, and what help that teacher may need.
For newer teachers, or teachers he doesn’t know too well, Fox likes to carve out 30-minute blocks to give feedback on a lesson he’s observed. Even in these chats, Fox said he tries not to lead with questions that would make teachers uncomfortable or unsure of how to answer.
“I feel like a lot of people kind of generally open with, ‘tell me what you liked about the lesson,’” he said. “That really seems like a gotcha question, because if I’m a teacher I’m uncertain what the right answer is supposed to be.”
Instead, Fox tries to understand how the teacher planned the lessons, the reasons they chose the practices they did, and whether there were any problems that cropped up, even outside of what Fox observed in the short window he was in class.
Fox has also tried to make his classroom visits more frequent because he believes the more visible he is to teachers, the more comfortable they’ll get with him in the classroom.
That’s important, teachers say. Principals should take the time, too, to build personal relationships with students when they come in for observations, said Chance Manzo, a special education teacher from Maywood, Ill.
“If the administration doesn’t have a relationship with the students, you will end up with a situation where the authority figure walks in and that immediately can put students on edge,” he said.
Building the relationship before is a sign of respect—and it can also make the observations more authentic, Manzo added.
Said Fox: “There’s a cultural foundation that needs to be laid before we can get to successful walkthroughs and observations.”
