The Educator Magazine U.K. Jan-April 2024 issue - Magazine - Page 73
A staged environment
A key aim of traditional observations
is to gather a valid set of evidence that
can be used to inform a view on what’s
likely to happen when there isn’t an
observer in the room. But lesson
observations often fall victim to the
Hawthorne Effect, where an observer
in the room influences the way people
behave.
Old school, lesson observations are not
a true representation of what normally
happens in the classroom. And I’ve
certainly learnt as an observer that
things are rarely ever as they seem.
I have found from my own experience,
observing a lesson in isolation is not a
great way to identify authentic teaching
and improve practice. The current format assumes that because one lesson
has gone well, or not gone well, that all
the other lessons being taught are likely
to go the same way. But teaching is
dynamic, and the way lessons are
routinely observed largely overlooks
this.
Smaller and more frequent sessions
reduce the likelihood of false learning
proxies and gives observers a much
better picture of the overall quality of
the teaching and learning that took
place.
Recording lesson observations using
ONVU Learning camera technology
to provide a 360-degree view of the
classroom with audio can help with
this. Teachers can choose to review the
lesson footage by themselves, or with
senior staff or peers. It helps them to
feel the lesson feel observation
happens with them, not to them.
Removing the barrier of hierarchy and
fostering a culture of self-reflection
where teachers can take ownership
over their own development, is a better
way to support staff and maximise
outcomes for students.
Subjective feedback
Teachers don’t plan standalone
lessons, but instead put a lot of work
into planning a sequence of lessons.
As traditional lesson observations tend
to be infrequent one-offs, they are not
therefore necessarily compatible with
assessing the quality of teaching.
The content and style of teaching
will reflect when the lesson being
observed happens within the sequence
of lessons. If this is not considered it
can lead to misguided or inappropriate
feedback.
Making judgements of teaching
practice based on a moment in time
can raise more questions than answers
and damage confidence and morale.
It’s also hard not to observe a lesson
through the lens of your own
experience. For example, when I was
a geography teacher, I chose to teach
a video-based lesson during an Ofsted
inspection. As video-based lessons can
have a bit of a bad rep this raised a few
eyebrows.
However, I had prepared a series of
worksheets for the students to work
through some low, medium, and high
order questions to ask themselves, so
they could interrogate the video and
not passively watch it. I received some
great feedback from the Inspector.
This feedback confirming in the
Inspector’s opinion what a good style
of Q&A looked like, subsequently
influenced my own judgement of what
an effective, enquiry-based lesson
should be when I came to observe
lessons as a senior leader.
My years as an Ofsted inspector
reinforced my view that how we observe is informed by our own
experiences and opinions and this can
drive well-meaning, but fundamentally
incorrect, lesson observation agendas
and narratives.
Time for change
An enduring criticism of lesson
observations is that they can’t truly
capture what they are meant to be
seeing, which is learning. It’s hard to
accurately gauge what ‘good teaching’
looks like.
We can come with a list of criteria to tick
it off, but criteria that is easily looked
for, such as homework set and group
work activity taking place, don’t really
tell us much about pupils’ learning or
the quality of teaching.
In trying to ‘evidence’ good teaching
and learning it can also lead us to look
for what we believe are proxies for
learning. I’ve seen schools have a policy
where every class begins with five
minutes of reading, but great as that
might be if whole school reading
is a priority, what can I do with this
observed activity? What meaningful
feedback can I give to inform teaching
practice and how can I gauge if every
child has benefitted from it?
Now apply this approach to a maths
observation. Maths doesn’t change and
if the maths teacher’s approach doesn’t
reflect what the observer thinks is a
good Q&A style, it doesn’t mean it is
wrong or they need development.
We can observe a teacher delivering a
lesson, and witness pupils responding
to that lesson, but is that enough to
make a judgement on a teacher’s
professional practice? I’ve found a
better approach is to give teachers
the opportunity to frequently
self-reflect on their teaching practice.
This helps observations to take on a
more practical application, as teachers
can address issues in the here and now
and gives them more agency over their
development.
It took me while to unpack this as
a member of SLT coming at it from
experience of teaching a humanities
subject when there is always something
to uncover.
Matt Tiplin is a former senior leader in a
MAT School and an Ofsted inspector. He
is also currently Chair of Governors of a
Community Primary School and the VP
of ONVU Learning.