How can principals and teachers get the most out of short classroom visits?

Traditional teacher evaluations pack an unfortunate one-two punch: They use up a lot of valuable time, and they rarely have any impact on teaching and learning. A single old-style evaluation takes a supervisor about four hours — pre-observation meeting, full lesson note-taking, write-up, and post conference. With a caseload of 25 teachers, that’s 100 hours a year — 17 full school days on a process that fails to show up in any of the research on what improves teaching.

A few years into my principalship at Boston’s Mather Elementary School, teachers prodded me to shift to mini-observations — short, frequent, unannounced classroom visits, each followed by a face-to-face conversation. I used this approach with faculty support and good results for almost a decade. A growing number of schools have adopted versions of mini-observations, moving teacher evaluations from ineffective, compliance-driven drudgery to coaching for continuous improvement.

Since leaving the principalship in 2002, I’ve coached school leaders, kept an eye on the research through my weekly Marshall Memo, and written and presented on school improvement. I’ve learned a lot about how I would improve mini-observations if I could time travel back to my days as a principal — and I’ve seen some practices that may seem like a good idea but aren’t so effective.

Fine-tuning the basic system

With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, here is a baker’s dozen of ways to boost the impact of short, frequent, unannounced observations on teaching and learning.

A manageable caseload

At the Mather, my big mistake was not splitting the supervision workload (42 teachers) with my very competent assistant principal — a failure of delegation that came from wanting to do everything myself. I averaged three mini-observations a day and saw each teacher about 10 times a year, but even though my observations and debriefs were on the short side (five minutes), I ran myself ragged. If my assistant principal and I had each supervised 21 teachers (a pretty typical caseload), we could each have averaged two mini-observations and two follow-up conversations a day, spent more time on each, and worked at a more reasonable pace.

Buffering email

Toward the end of my principalship, keeping up with the increasing volume of email became a time management headache. Traveling back in time, I would use a trick I’m now seeing in a number of schools: having an automated out-of-office message saying something like: “When students are in the building, I’m in classrooms, teacher meetings, and the cafeteria. I’ll respond to emails starting at 3:30 this afternoon. If this is urgent, please call XXX-XXX-XXXX.” This simple step would have kept emails from consuming my time during the day and allowed me to be out of my office most of the time — on call via cellphone for real emergencies. Of course, I would have checked with my superintendent to make sure this was OK with him.

Pre-visit prep

I sometimes walked into a classroom without enough reflection and had to quickly orient myself to the teacher’s unique profile. In my imaginary do-over, I would pause for a moment before each mini-observation to think about the teacher’s goals for the year, what we’d talked about after the previous visit, the curriculum being covered at that point, and anything important in the teacher’s professional and personal life. This quick orientation would have made me a more focused and thoughtful observer.

Look-fors

When I first started my practice of mini-observations, I entered classrooms without a clear sense of what I was looking for. I now believe it’s good to have a three-item mental checklist for each visit:

• What is the lesson objective, and is it appropriate to the grade level?
• Is what I’m seeing the most effective way to teach it?
• What’s the evidence that all students are learning?

To answer these questions in a short classroom visit, I needed to look over students’ shoulders at the texts, worksheets, and writing assignments they were doing. I also would quietly ask a couple of students: What are you learning today? Why is it important? How will you know when you know it? Those simple actions would have made me a better observer and improved the conversation with the teacher afterward.

Tests

When I walked into a classroom and realized that the class was taking a test, I turned around and left, motioning to the teacher that I’d come back another time. I now realize this was a missed opportunity to look at the test — an important part of the curriculum. A better approach would be to get a copy of the test and read it carefully, maybe sit down and take it myself, and talk with the teacher afterward about the content, format, and level of difficulty. Or I would offer to proctor the test for the rest of the period, making it possible for the teacher to observe a colleague’s class.

Where to debrief

For follow-up conversations, I usually caught teachers in the copying room, corridor, playground, parking lot, or my office. I now realize that the best location is the teacher’s classroom when students aren’t there: It’s the teacher’s home turf, which neutralizes the power dynamic. It’s easier to talk about student work, material on the walls, furniture arrangement, and how individual students are doing when we’re in that space. Being in the classroom also serves as a memory prompt, which is helpful for supervisors who are in a lot of classrooms every week. One more thing: It’s easier to wrap up the conversation; if a teacher is comfortably seated in your office, conversations tend to be much longer.

Structuring the conversation

My conversations after a mini-observation sometimes started with awkward small talk before we got down to business. I’ve recently hit upon a variation of the much-criticized feedback sandwich (Figure 1):

• Start by describing something that went well, with details.
• Get the teacher talking about the lesson with a good prompt.
• Decide on a coaching point (if there is one) and talk with the teacher about it.
• Agree on an actionable next step and offer support.

Here are a few prompts I’ve picked up in my travels. The key is picking the right one for each situation (or coming up with a different one):

• Tell me a little about what was going on before I came in.
• I’m curious about what happened after I left.
• Tell me something you hoped I would notice.
• When do you think the most learning took place?
• Did anything happen that you didn’t expect?
• Is there something you’d especially like feedback on?
• Are there students this lesson didn’t work for?
• I noticed that Helene was really buckling down. What’s changed?
• Can you walk me through your thinking on this part of the lesson?
• Did you get your intended results?
• Can we look through the exit tickets?
• You’re a great teacher. That lesson wasn’t great. Let’s talk.

The last one was a blunt but reassuring message to a New Jersey teacher after a lesson that he and his principal knew had not gone well.

Deft closure

An effective way to end debrief conversations is for the supervisor to ask, “What’s your big takeaway?” When asked with the right tone (not “Tell me what I just told you”), this gets the teacher to sum up the most important message and lets the supervisor know whether the appreciation and coaching points got through.

Stepping up to the plate

One of my biggest regrets as principal was not being more courageous addressing mediocre teaching practices. I wish I had spoken more frankly about, for example, low-level worksheets, teachers calling only on students who raised their hands, and teachers grading papers while students worked at their desks. Criticizing practices like these would have ruffled a few feathers, but if it led to better learning, that would have been worth it. It also would have been helpful to have all-faculty discussions of our school’s red lines — things we wouldn’t tolerate in our own children’s classrooms — and then identify some mediocre practices to avoid.

A short written summary

In the years I did mini-observations, I used a faculty checklist to be sure I followed up with each teacher and remembered what I saw, but these very brief jottings were just for me. Since leaving the principalship, I’ve been persuaded that I was missing an important step: sending a summary of the conversations to the teacher afterward.

This has four advantages:

• It puts the substance of the debrief on the record, increasing the chance the teacher will reflect on compliments and specific suggestions for improvement. A quick conversation can be quickly forgotten — or misremembered.
• Supervisors can scan previous write-ups to prepare for future mini-observations.
• The school’s leadership team can discuss write-ups to identify schoolwide trends and plan strategies for spreading good ideas and intervening with struggling teachers.
• Having a paper trail informs higher-ups of the substantive work that’s going on with teachers and, if they’re skeptical about mini-observations, helps convince them of their value.

The danger of written follow-ups is supervisors getting bogged down in paperwork and not keeping up a good pace of mini-observations. The solution is keeping written summaries very short. I love the idea hatched by Ray Fugate, a Tennessee school administrator who helped develop the T-EVAL platform (www.edusoftllc.com): limiting digital write-ups to no more than 1,000 characters (about 160 words). Supervisors who have worked with this limit have found it’s the Goldilocks length: enough to include substantive appreciation and coaching from the post-mini conversation, short enough to be written in about 10 minutes. Ideally the 1,000-character limit is built into an electronic teacher-evaluation platform so you literally can’t type another character when you reach the limit. This compels supervisors to be brief — very helpful for those who’ve been trained to do evidence-filled scripting and need official “permission” to write less.

Another helpful feature in an electronic platform: When the teacher opens the summary, it’s proof that it’s been received, eliminating the bureaucratic step of requiring a signature. In most cases, teachers don’t feel the need to respond, but if they do, they should also be limited to 1,000 characters. The whole process is quick, efficient, personal, and effective.

Rubric scoring

When I was a principal, Boston used a standard end-of-year evaluation form in which I had to write a narrative for each teacher summarizing what I’d learned in mini-observations, follow-up conversations, and other points of contact. I found it difficult to remember everything, time-consuming to write it up, and I still felt I wasn’t capturing a full picture of the teacher’s work.

Since I left the principalship, teacher-evaluation rubrics have become common in K-12 schools. Used correctly, a rubric can be very helpful: It provides a detailed, comprehensive description of a teacher’s responsibilities; it serves as a memory prompt for all the interactions a supervisor has during the year; it describes performance at different levels of proficiency (usually four), making it possible to rate performance based on specific descriptions at each level; and it makes all this transparent so teachers know what they’ll be evaluated on and can self-assess and reach out for resources to improve in areas that are less than effective.

Time traveling back to my principal days, I would bring a good rubric with me, introduce it to the faculty at the beginning of the year, ask each teacher to self-assess and set goals, check in with teachers mid-year to compare my tentative ratings with their self-assessments, and then repeat that process at the end of the school year, adding brief comments for areas not covered by the rubric. This would have been much quicker and more comprehensive than traditional write-ups — and considerably more helpful to teachers.

Unit planning

As a principal, I expected but didn’t inspect lesson plans, which meant that with each mini-observation, I had to figure out how the snapshot I observed fit with the rest of the lesson. Traveling back in time, I would fill this gap not by asking teachers for lesson plans but by making a concerted effort to get teacher teams to develop unit plans in which they spelled out in advance the knowledge, skills, big ideas, and essential questions of each five- to eight-week chunk of the curriculum. During mini-observations, I’d look for essential questions on the wall and see if teachers were using them to get students thinking about the broader purpose of each lesson. In post-mini chats, I’d ask teachers to put the lesson in the broader context of the unit.

Results-focused teacher teams

It took years at the Mather, but we eventually figured out how to give each grade-level team a weekly 90-minute uninterrupted meeting (by scheduling specials next to lunch once a week and convincing teachers to agree to one working lunch). My regret is that we didn’t take full advantage of these opportunities for team collaboration. If I could do it over, I would make sure teachers used these meetings to regularly look at common assessments and student work, talk about what was working and what wasn’t, and adopt the most effective materials and teaching practices.

A sign that these meetings were truly productive would be if I heard this question: “Your kids did better than mine; what did you do?” That would tell me that the team had the trust, humility, and collegiality for frank discussions about pedagogy and content that continuously improved practice. Periodically visiting these meetings would also have given me “3-D glasses” for my mini-observations (Paul Bambrick-Santoyo’s phrase, personal communication, 2008) because I would know how students were being assessed, what instructional challenges teachers were wrestling with, and what new ideas they were trying out.

Well-intentioned but problematic practices

Working with school leaders who are striving to get into classrooms more frequently, I’ve seen six practices whose efficacy I question:

Checklists

Some supervisors tell me they feel naked walking into a classroom without a list of look-fors or a rubric. I understand this sentiment, but if they focus on matching what’s on the form with the complex dynamics of a classroom, they’ll miss a lot. In addition, from the teacher’s point of view, the optics aren’t great: an administrator at the back of the room, head down, checking boxes, looking like a compliance officer. If the supervisor is on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone, the teacher may wonder if they’re multitasking on something not related to the classroom.

My recommendation is for supervisors to take a deep breath, slow down, walk around, look at student work, chat with a couple of students, observe what the teacher is doing, and jot down a few notes for the conversation with the teacher afterward.

Rubric-scoring a lesson

Detailed teacher-evaluation rubrics are a major development in the last decade, describing teachers’ overall responsibilities — planning, classroom management, delivery of instruction, checking for understanding, working with families, professional ethics. But rubrics are the wrong “grain size” (Baeder, 2018) for evaluating a lesson and even less appropriate for a mini-observation. Unfortunately, some supervisors are using rubrics to rate the teacher while observing a lesson, creating a checklist mentality and contentious exchanges in which teachers argue with the umpire about individual scores rather than talking about curriculum, pedagogy, and students.

It is far better to have a brief conversation with the teacher, followed by a brief narrative summary, and then use the rubric at the end of the school year to sum up performance, drawing on multiple visits, conversations, other points of contact, and the teacher’s self-assessment.

Shooting from the hip

Some supervisors email feedback during or immediately after an observation or leave a glow/grow form on the teacher’s desk as they’re leaving. This seems time-efficient, and it reduces the time teachers must anxiously wait to hear what the supervisor thought. If asked, teachers might prefer this kind of immediate feedback because it gives them a heads-up about possible criticism so they can prepare their defense. But I believe this is not the best approach. Here’s why:

• The observer may have missed important details or misunderstood something in the lesson, making the feedback incomplete and annoying.
• The teacher hasn’t had a chance to explain what happened before and after the visit, what’s going on with particular students, and spur-of-the-moment curriculum decisions.
• With mini-observations, the possibility of misunderstanding or taking something out of context is even greater, so it’s especially important to have the conversation first.
• Sending an email or text signals that the supervisor’s mind is made up, so it’s less likely that there will be a meaningful face-to-face conversation.
• Most important of all, giving immediate feedback misses the opportunity to have a two-way discussion about teaching and learning, build trust, exchange ideas, and learn from each other — the human side of this business.

In short, it’s much better to have a face-to-face conversation first, as soon as possible after an observation, even if there isn’t a burning issue to discuss. The teacher has a chance to give context, provide missing information, correct mistaken impressions, and talk about other things that are on their mind.

Real-time coaching

In some schools, administrators interrupt instruction if they have a concern and demonstrate, on the spot, how the lesson should be conducted. This is driven by a sense of urgency — students should not be subjected to mediocre or ineffective teaching for one more minute. There are classroom emergencies that require quick intervention, and some teachers have such a trusting relationship with their supervisor that they welcome this kind of tough-love intervention. But the pitfalls of intervening during lessons are obvious: undermining the teacher’s authority with students, jumping to conclusions and intervening when there really isn’t a problem, and leading teachers to dread every supervisory visit. Except for dire circumstances, it’s better to give the teacher feedback privately when students aren’t there.

Inequity

To some school leaders, it makes sense for rookie teachers and those having classroom problems to have more mini-
observations while superstars are visited less often. I see the logic but disagree. Teachers notice if some colleagues are getting more (or fewer) visits, and they can draw invidious conclusions. (Admin must think I’m less competent.) Also, some of our best teachers are starved for appreciation and feedback, and their effective instructional practices need to be noticed and spread around the school. I think the best policy is for everyone to get the same number of mini-observations — and then differentiating by making sure rookie teachers get additional coaching. With teachers on improvement plans, administrators shift gears and use full-lesson observations and detailed feedback with timelines for improvement.

Inspecting lesson plans and artifacts

Instructional guru Madeline Hunter (1986) said it best: Pre-observation conversations about the lesson plan are not a good use of anyone’s time. One of the most unfortunate practices I’ve seen is requiring teachers to hand in the full week’s lesson plans on Monday; this usurps part of the teacher’s weekend and then chews up the administrator’s time. Of course, teachers should be prepared every day, but Tuesday’s lesson plan should be shaped partly by checks for understanding on Monday. It’s better for teachers to plan one day at a time, aiming toward the unit plan’s big ideas and summative assessment, with supervisors spot-checking lesson plans during mini-observations.

A compliance mentality

It’s a good idea for supervisors to have a target number of daily (or weekly) mini-observations based on how many teachers they are working with, and how many times they want to visit each teacher by the end of the year. But if supervisors feel pressured by their boss to meet a quota, the process can become oppressive. How can superintendents and heads of school avoid this dynamic? By co-observing with supervisors, talking about what they’re seeing in classrooms, sharing common insights and effective strategies in meetings, and emphasizing what Doug Lemov (2021) calls the J-factor (p. 497) — the joy of seeing teachers doing amazing things and kids lighting up as they learn.

Value-added and objectives-based teacher evaluation

One of the biggest mistakes of the Race to the Top era (2009-2015) was using test scores to evaluate teachers. Researchers (e.g., Darling-Hammond et al., 2012) have shown that value-added measures are highly unreliable in assessing an individual teacher (and several successful teacher lawsuits have driven this point home). Student learning objectives (SLOs) are designed for teachers whose students don’t take standardized tests, but I’ve observed educators gaming the high-stakes process and undermining authentic and collaborative professional learning communities. The good news is that the 2015 ESSA legislation removed those requirements, and U.S. public schools no longer must use test scores or SLOs as part of the evaluation process.

Student learning should be central to educators’ conversations; the problem was the way schools were required to measure it. It is much more effective and helpful to look over students’ shoulders during mini-observations, talk about evidence of learning in follow-up conversations with teachers, discuss student work and common assessments in teacher team meetings, analyze September-to-June learning gains for groups of students, and have faculty-wide discussions about achievement trends and challenges. My mantra with school leaders and faculties: Shift the conversation to results and keep it close to the action.

A manageable shift

One concern I’ve heard about mini-observations is that they’re more than ordinary mortals can handle — that only superstars can get into classrooms this much, see so much in 10 minutes, be disciplined enough to have helpful face-
to-face conversations with teachers, and provide cogent written follow-up. I disagree! The design features of the mini-observation system make it manageable for almost all school leaders — and puts administrators and teachers on a positive learning curve. Here’s how:

For one thing, supervisors have multiple at-bats with teachers to improve their observational skills, and teachers have lots of chances to show their best stuff and put not-so-good moments in perspective. Regular face-to-face conversations involved in mini-observations allow teachers to “school” supervisors on what they are doing and correct misunderstandings over time. The frequent classroom visits build trust and communication between teachers and administrators, easing the stress of supervisory interactions, in a way that a few longer visits might not. And the frequency and growth in trust means that teachers are usually less defensive (especially if the conversations take place in their own classroom).

Shorter observations that address one leverage point per observation make feedback conversations more manageable than observations that attempt to cover a whole lesson. And comments on teaching at the micro-level are much less stressful for teachers (and administrators) than a single big-deal, comprehensive end-of-year evaluation. When the summative evaluation comes, it is less fraught because it can build naturally on frequent mini-observations.

Frequent visits enable supervisors to see wonderful moments that reinforce the practice and worrisome moments that motivate them to keep up the pace and address mediocre and ineffective practices. In short, mini-observations bring out the best in administrators, are something they can learn to do well, and stand the best chance of bringing about steady improvements in teaching and learning.

References

Baeder, J. (2018). Now we’re talking. Solution Tree.

Darling-Hammond, L., Cook, C., Jaquith, A., & Hamilton, M. (2012). Creating a comprehensive system for evaluating and supporting effective teaching. Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education.

Hunter, M. (1986). Let’s eliminate the preobservation conference. Educational Leadership, 43 (6), 69-70.

Lemov, D. (2021). Teach like a champion 3.0 (3rd ed.), Jossey-Bass.

This article appears in the April 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 7, p. 52-57.