The Educator Magazine U.K. Jan-April 2024 issue - Magazine - Page 72
Matt Tiplin former
senior leader in
a MAT school and
Ofsted Inspector
reflects on why
his approach
to lesson
observations
ticked boxes
rather than
developed staff.
What I’ve learned about lesson
observations
Despite lesson observations being
part of the fabric of school life, they
don’t always achieve what they were
designed to do, which is to support
teachers’ professional development and
ensure pupils receive the best learning
experience.
This is because lesson observations
often end up doubling as appraisals,
or to monitor if top-down school-wide
priorities are being met. This can
unintentionally leave valued colleagues
feeling short-changed in terms of their
CPD.
So, with hindsight what would I do
differently as a senior leader that
doesn’t leave teachers feeling lesson
observations are little more than a box
ticking exercise?
What’s the point of a lesson
observation?
Multi-tasking goes with the territory
of being a senior leader. This can mean
observations can be inadvertently
used as a short cut to find evidence to
support wider school performance. This
can then make it difficult to provide
meaningful feedback to the teacher to
inform their practice.
specific observation, to show pupils can
articulate what they have learnt in the
subject.
A top-down approach to lesson
observations reduces teachers’
autonomy to decide areas for
development for themselves. If every
teacher in the school is expected to
focus on a specific objective it can
cause a disproportionate focus away
from other things that the teacher in
their experience knows are significant
priorities.
The observation will not have
supported the teacher’s personal
development or necessarily been an
accurate gauge of the students
learning. By focussing on the
school-wide priority it has taken away
from the teacher the opportunity to
focus on what they wanted to focus on
given their knowledge of the class. It’s
reduced the observation to little more
than a tick in the box.
Take the objective of whole school
literacy for example and apply it to a PE
lesson observation.
In the best-case scenario, the teacher
interprets the objective as the
development of students’ knowledge
of subject specific terminology. This
could be evidenced in a game of netball
when the students’ vocal interactions
between each other helps positioning
and understanding of strategic play.
The observer, who can see and hear
how the vocal interactions play out
then ‘hooks’ onto this ‘evidence’ of
school-wide literacy in a subject
This is something nobody wants.
But there is sometimes an assumption
that those at the top of the school
hierarchy are the most expert at staff
development and this is not necessarily
true.
I know from my own experience in
leadership that the teachers I oversaw
were almost aways far more expert in
the classroom than me. Time is therefore better spent enabling those people
to do ground up work, rather than the
one thing the SLT has decided should
be a priority.