Classroom Observation Templates: Why Most of Them are Terrible + My Favourite

I have been subjected to very many observation templates by administrators and instructional leaders during my years in the classroom. I have also used a few mandated templates to observe other teachers. They can be marginally useful but have an inherent tendency to lose the plot and reduce teaching and learning to an isolated 40-minute endeavour without a past and a future. I have received glowing feedback on practically useless classes which ticked all the boxes and severe criticism for classes that actually made a difference.

I’d classify bad observation templates into three types: the overload, the judgy template and the force fit. Let me explain.

1. The Overload

The observer is expected to observe a hundred different aspects of the classroom, and the teacher who is aware of this fact is also trying to fit in the hundred expectations somehow. The templates look something like this:

Don’t bother zooming in. What you get out of templates like this is more documentation that no one reads, and in the event someone does, they can’t make sense of the gazillion pieces of raw data and arrive at a certain big picture and next steps. If your coach is talented enough to wade through the data to come up with something sensible, they didn’t need this in the first place.

2. The Judgy Template

School leadership spends enormous time and energy lamenting about the fact that they need their teachers to be open to feedback, and then some more time and energy in whole-group meetings about how to give and receive feedback without judging or feeling judged. Here’s free advice from me: change your judgy template. Look at this one:

When you have explicitly asked the observer to look for what’s ‘bad’, judgement is in the design, irrespective of how you name your rows and columns. No, your teachers are not afraid of judgment; they feel misunderstood and maybe even demeaned. Suddenly, all their meticulous work in planning a lesson and understanding what their students need is only as valuable as the last, unwanted kernel in a giant tub of popcorn. Where in this template is the scope for the observer to learn about the teacher, the students and their context?

3. The Force Fit

First, the school leadership likely went through the following motions:

• observe all classrooms for the first time in ages

• note down judgements using the judgy template

• get together, lament about how teachers are all working in silos and how desperately they need common priorities

• create 3 priorities, all beginning with the same letter, such as relevance, resilience and relationships

• weave it into a new observation template after spending a couple of whole-group staff meetings on what these priorities mean and asking teachers to come up with ways they’ll include them in each and every lesson

Teachers pour countless frustrating hours into proving to themselves, their students and the observers that knowing what a noun clause is is relevant. Do I believe we must teach what’s relevant to students? Yes. Have I had to discard key pieces of knowledge because I couldn’t articulate why it’s relevant only to find out later that I missed an important prerequisite? Yes.

Can any of these or other observation templates lead to a few productive conversations and improvement in teacher effectiveness? Sure. Am I willing, hence, to turn a blind eye to the foundational mindsets that created them? No. Because those baseless superiority complexes and substance-less condescension do bleed into conversations at one point or the other.

Here are a few pointers if you’d like to take a second look at how classroom observations happen in your school:

1. Observations that assess a teacher’s abilities for administrative reasons cannot use the same templates used for observations meant to support and learn from each other.

2. You can run an effective school without observations of the former kind; you cannot without the latter.

3. Encourage teachers who think on their own and think about their students’ needs more than the effort they put into pleasing you.

4. Create conditions where pleasing you is not a teacher’s top priority.

5. Ask your teachers: do they feel observations and subsequent conclusions drawn about them and their teaching accurately reflect the impact of their work on student learning?

My Favourite: The Double-Entry Journal

The Double-Entry Journal is popular as a reading comprehension strategy. Read ‘Knitting Writing’, the sixth chapter in Coming to Know: Writing to Learn in the Intermediate Grades by Nancie Atwell to know how Charlene Loughlin Vaughan uses it in one of the best ways possible with students.

I was introduced to the Double-Entry as a teacher/classroom observation tool during my internship at CTL in 2016.

The best part of using the double-entry journal for teacher observations is that the format requires you to be attuned to what is happening in the moment in the classroom. It encourages your brain to not be cluttered with what “should” be happening. At the minimum, the format doesn’t dictate your behaviour, unlike the formats I wrote about in the previous post.

This format is designed for learning, understanding and reflecting. It is not meant to judge or change a teacher.

Experiment!

Try out the four different formats above and reflect:

1. Which format led to the most productive conversations with teachers post-observation?

2. Which format resulted in maximum learning (for students/teachers/yourself)?

   (not student engagement, not student performance, but student learning)

Immediate improvement in student learning, while desirable, is not always practical. Sometimes, days and weeks pass while the adult brains are churning, changing and learning before they can create circumstances that increase student learning. Sometimes the adult brain in question is the teacher’s. At other times it’s that of the coach/leader/admin.

What observation templates or formats do you use? Are there ways in which they are inadvertently impacting the learning and cultural aspects of the school? Get in touch to chat or if you’d like me to review your observation formats and other teacher support structures at your school.

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