Observers as Learners
For the past couple of years my school has been implementing PLC (professional learning communities) to give us more control over our own professional development. It's been great for me to have dedicated time to nerd out about teacher things. Last year the group I was in worked on Teacher Innovation, and we shared ideas like how to make sure homework is a valuable use of time for those who give it, how to make sure assessments matched instruction, and whether or not we were inadvertently asking students to cram rather than actually learn.
This year, among all of the great options, I chose the Peer Observation and Coaching PLC.
We’ve only had one meeting, but my mind has already been racing through all of the things we could accomplish in this PLC.
We spent our time discussing our own experiences around four questions: What has been a success for you this year? What has been a struggle for you this year? What is something you hope to get from this PLC? And, What are things we can do with this PLC? (I may be mis-remembering the last question).
I was in awe of the amount of support each member of the PLC gave to one another, intently listening to each other, giving words of support and signaling their agreement with what we can be doing better, and just taking in that we all chose to join this PLC because we all have a desire to become better teachers, and help everyone on campus to continue to learn.
Being that we work in an independent school, observations are not really tied to performance. I wish that were the case for all teachers, but unfortunately that’s not the world we live in. When I was a public school teacher, evaluations were not only about teacher performance, but student performance, and we had domains that we had to check off to show that we added value to the school community as a whole.
If you know a teacher, you know someone who has been scorned by an evaluation. Perhaps evaluators weren’t well versed in what your class should look like, or maybe they didn’t listen to you when you explained WHY your class should look different. Maybe the evaluator didn’t ever give positive feedback and only ever told you what you were doing wrong without any direction on how to improve. There are a myriad of things that have scorned teachers in regard to evaluations. Heck, I have even seen teachers who have won Teacher of the Year get marked as ineffective.
These kinds of complaints show me, or at least lend themselves to the perception, that evaluative observations do not exist to help teachers become better. And these perceptions are part of why I wanted to do this PLC, to find a better way to do observations to help teachers continue to improve their practice.
One of the things that really stuck with me as we went around the table during our first PLC meeting is my colleague, a department chair, describing what it is that he tries to incorporate into his department: “Observers as learners”.
In the Observers as Learners mindset of observation, we go into classrooms not to judge and give feedback to teachers, but because WE want to learn something from them.
“Hey, Bob, I heard you’re really good at getting students to collaborate in class, do you mind if I come watch how you do that?”
“Danielle, your students were talking about how you made reading a book chapter really engaging, can you let me know next time you do that so I can try to imitate that?”
There is so much wealth of knowledge and strategy and technique in each of our schools that we don’t have time to, or don’t think about going to check out.
If you have been to a Language teaching conference you have probably seen or experienced a Coaching Circle. In a coaching circle, there is a teacher at the front of the room demoing a skill, a row of students (or teachers playing the role of student), and a row of observers.
As the teacher teaches, the students are perfect little angels, and the observers observe. At the end of the demo, the Coach helps facilitate the reflective conversation. One of the rules of coaching is to focus on the positive. This is for two reasons: 1) if you don’t like something the teacher does, when you go back to your class, simply don’t do that thing. 2) The teacher demonstrator probably already felt if something didn’t go well and we don’t need to harp on that. So if we keep things positive we are encouraging the teacher to continue to do the amazing things we saw during their demo.
The positivity centered discussions at a coaching circle focus on two questions: What did the teacher do to keep language comprehensible, and How did they connect with the students?
This is exactly what I think the Observer as Learners method of observation should look like. Something about the Coaching circle is that the demonstrator teacher is probably the person who learns the least. The student role is learning language, and the observer is learning what they want, and don’t want, to take back to their class. So many times in coaching circles have I seen little tweaks that I take with me to my classroom. Maybe it’s the phrasing they use on an activity, or something as simple as using two different colored markers to make sure English and L2 are visibly different so students know where to focus.
Moving forward on this, what I would love to see schools do is have some sort of google form or spreadsheet where teachers can list out (or select from a predetermined list) what their strengths are so teachers can look for someone who is really good at a skill they want to improve and make a plan to go observe, and learn from them.