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Skeptical teachers learn that peer observations with feedback can provide learning opportunities for both parties and shift school cultures, too.

 

Thirty minutes into our first class, my students — all experienced educators enrolled in a master’s level teacher leadership program — became very quiet, abandoning the cheerfulness of our initial greetings and introductions. The somber mood descended as I outlined the clinical practice requirement for our course. In the next week to 10 days, I explained, each of them would engage with a school colleague in an initial cycle of peer observation. The cycle would begin with a one-on-one meeting to talk about the colleague’s pedagogical aims, followed by an observation of his or her classroom practice, and then a follow-up meeting to discuss the observation. A second cycle would focus on questions and ideas generated by the first cycle, as would a third. I assured them that we’d talk more about this process and that the syllabus contained a clear description of requirements as well as a qualitative rubric to guide their write-ups.

Their reactions surprised me, partly because of my former students’ very positive experiences with the same assessment. Those previous students, though, had communicated with me only online, via papers and discussion boards; in the online environment, I wasn’t privy to spontaneous, unfiltered signs of students’ initial resistance. On that first night of the face-to-face class, these experienced and well-regarded educators patiently explained to me why this assessment wouldn’t work. Primarily, they informed me, requests to observe colleagues would not be well-received: Teachers were busy preparing students for mandated standardized assessments; teachers’ time was taken up with preparing for their own evaluations based on new student learning objectives; teachers would want and had a right to expect more notice before an observation. They told me that their own schedules simply don’t include time to observe colleagues during the school day.

As our course progressed and we developed a mutual trust, I came to better understand the resistance I encountered that first night. These educators, who collectively taught a range of grade levels and hailed from different schools as well as the central office, were struggling to reconcile the expectations I was establishing for their clinical coursework with their prior experiences of supervision. While I was describing structured collegial discourse about goals and pedagogy, they were recalling one-sided critiques of their practice. I was asking them to establish microcontexts that could support their and their colleagues’ inquiry into professional practice, but they were accustomed to a system of “inspection and control” (Glickman, Gordon, & Ross-Gordon, 2013, p. 8). Marie’s final paper (all names are pseudonyms) described the disconnect this way:

I have never thought of the process of observation as a collaborative process. My experience being evaluated has been one of examination and documentation. An evaluator would watch a lesson and then, within five days (the county requirement), hand me a typed document that included several paragraphs relating their observations. This document was read to me, and I was asked to sign at the bottom. There was no discussion, reflection, or collaboration.

My students were familiar with supervisory structures that positioned them as implementers, not generators, of curriculum and “best practices” — practices that have been created elsewhere by others. They had learned to see themselves as recipients of knowledge and conceptions of good practice, and they understood their role, at least through the eyes of their supervisors, as transmitters or conveyors of knowledge and skills. In their experience, judgments about their success were made by authoritative figures, and those judgments increasingly had come to them via high-stakes measures.

Sharing, critiquing, and rethinking practice is standard procedure in healthy professional cultures, but at the start of our course, my students evidently were uneasy with such processes. They are not alone. Workplace research by Gallup, the polling organization, found that teachers were least likely, among 14 occupational groups, to report that their “supervisor always creates an environment that is trusting and open.” They also placed dead last — after executives and physicians, yes, but also behind miners, construction workers, and bus drivers — in reporting that they were “treated with respect all day yesterday” and that “at work, my opinions seem to count.” No surprise, but among members of the 14 occupations, teachers also reported the second-highest levels of stress (Lopez & Sidhu, 2013). I can’t help but assume that the resistance I encountered that first night has a lot to do with my students’ experience in a school culture that emphasizes the management and control of teachers rather than support for their professional growth.

Resistance to observing colleagues while teaching grew out of teachers’ experience in a school culture that emphasizes the management and control of teachers rather than support for their professional growth.

Peer observation cycles, by contrast, are meant to challenge ingrained conceptions of teachers’ role in schools putting them in a position to consider, together, effective ways to reach students. They invite teams of practitioners to immerse themselves in trying to address problems that are immediately relevant to them and other members of their school communities. Done well, they promote teacher learning that is constructivist and embedded (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), supporting a culture of collaborative inquiry rather than the familiar norms of individualism and isolation that pervade many schools, leaving them intellectually dormant places (Lortie, 1975; Whitford & Wood, 2010; Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012).

Taking an inquiry stance

Because I believed strongly in the importance of this work and had seen its value before — not to mention that the peer observation was a key part of the course and that I, too, had standards to meet and data to report — we soldiered on, despite my sense that I was rallying troops for what they apparently anticipated would be a series of clashes with their peers. We began by watching videos of classroom practice taken from the web (e.g., The Teaching Channel and Edutopia) and, rather than tell them what to look for in the segments, I asked just that they pay attention to what they saw: “As experienced educators, what do you notice? Make notes for yourself about what you would like to discuss with the teacher in the video.” Then, in small groups, they shared.

Their reactions and responses were not uniform; these veteran teachers disagreed about what was most important in the video clips. They also offered a lot of “it depends” comments: “It depends on the relationship — on what’s gone on before — between the teacher and his students”; “it depends on what the teacher’s goals are for this lesson”; “it depends on what these particular students’ needs are.” In other words, as they attempted to analyze what they saw, they found that context mattered a great deal.

Further, they saw value in their diversity of responses. Their very different interpretations provoked them to take a closer look at the videos and also to question their own beliefs about professional practice. They had much to say to each other, and trying to get them to end their conversations was difficult. This level of collegial inquiry, I told them, is what to aim for when they engaged in the observation cycles with their colleagues.

As we unpacked the processes they used to observe and discuss teaching practices, some students expressed concern about subjectivity: When people are being evaluated, there isn’t room for all this conversing, and varied, subjective opinions can too easily lead to low evaluation scores. Effective, hardworking teachers, they argued, were entitled to clear paths to good evaluations.

This was an easy lead-in for me to re-emphasize the distinction between developmental supervision and evaluation, or between formative and summative assessments of teacher practice. In response to this concern, we also took class time to view (and interrupt and discuss) the video, “Making teacher evaluations meaningful” (Advance Illinois 2012, available on YouTube), in which Charlotte Danielson explains the motivations and rationale behind her well-known Danielson Framework for Teaching. Like others I’ve worked with, these educators were surprised to learn that this framework, so often used to evaluate their practice, was originally designed to help teachers improve their work, not to help administrators judge them.

Finally, our discussion circled back to the course requirement that had been met with such obvious dismay: The point of the peer observation cycles, I explained, would be to engage in formative, developmental supervision of their colleagues, not evaluation.

The very different interpretations of what they had observed provoked the teachers to take a closer look at the videos and also to question their own beliefs about professional practice.

Developing practice, affecting school cultures

As they engaged in the observation cycles, the students elected to use whichever instruments they believed would be most helpful in the given situation, instead of assuming that they had to rely on standardized tools or frameworks. For example, some of them created their own, customized observation tools, depending on the sorts of feedback their partners wanted to receive. Others chose to rely on diagrams, marking teacher movements and/or student responses; some opted for rubrics and frameworks they had used in their own districts and that their own administrators used.

None of my students, in either the online or the face-to-face course, ever claimed that these observation cycles were easy. By and large, they found the initial observations, especially, to be far more difficult than they expected. There is “so much happening in the classroom,” they pointed out, “that it’s hard to know where to look or what to look for.” One noted the strangeness of being “on the other side of the desk,” and others shared how intimidating it was to observe a teacher they considered far more experienced or accomplished than they were. Many voiced the concern that it would be hard to maintain friendly and supportive relationships with colleagues while critiquing their work.

Nonetheless, through three sets of observation cycles, these teachers/students found myriad ways to help colleagues examine their own professional practice. They learned that even the strongest teachers had room to grow — perhaps to include more students in class discussions, to pose more interesting and open-ended questions for students to consider, or to engage students in ongoing cycles of feedback and revision. They learned that the less-experienced teachers among them were often most appreciative of suggestions on lesson planning and organization, student discipline, and classroom management.

In several instances, the process led partners to identify and explore a topic that interested both of them and that went beyond individual practice. For example, as a result of the work they did in their observation cycle, a teacher named Sarah and a departmental colleague, Tim, found themselves asking questions about school policy and recommending that their department change its instructional practices. In their preobservation meeting, Tim said he believed that his on-level students arrived in his classes with negative perceptions of their own academic abilities. Thus, he aimed to provide ample opportunities for their active and successful involvement in the class.

Indeed, the first time she observed Tim’s class, Sarah was “blown away” by the amount of student participation, but when she focused on the quality of that participation, she realized that Tim’s instruction was highly teacher-centered and directive. This reminded her of what she had learned in an earlier meeting with representatives from a local community college, who told her that students from her district often “want to be told what’s important,” and they struggle when asked to take a more active role in their own learning. These two data sources — observations of a colleague whom she genuinely respected, coupled with the feedback offered by the college instructors — led Sarah to question her own and her department’s expectations regarding authentic academic challenges for on-level students. She and her colleagues “are constantly finding ways to engage students,” she wrote, “but that might be leading us to do too much hand-holding.”

In short, far from approaching her peer observations as “inspection and control” of another teacher, Sarah had identified a larger pedagogical problem, one that influenced her own teaching as well. When she and other members of her department went on to develop new teaching strategies (focusing on high-level discussion and critical analysis) and policy recommendations (challenging the use of academic tracking), they affected the whole school.

Another important lesson had to do with teachers’ concerns about maintaining positive relationships with peers while offering them constructive feedback. Consider what happened when Bridget, an English department lead teacher, asked Lia, her counterpart in the social studies department, to work with her on an observation cycle. Lia agreed, in part because she wanted to improve her content-area writing instruction and was aware of Bridget’s expertise. However, when Bridget first observed Lia’s class, she was so surprised by students’ off-task behaviors that she found it impossible to focus on her writing instruction.

Rather than begin their first follow-up meeting with a critique, Bridget chose to start by offering a neutral description of the class, inviting Lia to give her own impressions:

The fact that we first focused on the description of what I saw, discussed Lia’s perception of the same events, and then collaborated on possible interpretations and solutions led to a rich conversation that ended in goal setting for my next observation. Lia was the one to bring up what she needed — to gain better control of the side conversations that occurred during her lesson — which allowed me to brainstorm with her possible ways to tackle the issue in the future.

After addressing the attention issues, Bridget and Lia later went on to promote the use of cross-disciplinary peer observation cycles in their respective departments, focusing specifically on writing across the curriculum.

In spite of their initial resistance, all of the students in this face-to-face class were persuaded by their experiences of engaging with colleagues in genuine dialogue about their work. In their final papers, they wrote about how this approach created spaces for them and their peers to think anew about teaching practice and refresh their underlying commitment to professional growth. By the final cycle (and often before then), they had come to see the process as immensely rewarding; many had noted that they learned more about teaching than did the person they observed; and many had marveled at how different their department, classes, and even the school corridors felt to them when they and their colleagues had a chance to be there together without stakes attached to their actions. Moreover, several students who have taken this course (either with me or with one of my colleagues) have taken it upon themselves to replicate and scale up the process in their schools, using nonevaluative peer observation as their core approach to improving teaching practice and school culture.

How do we extend this narrative?

Improving school cultures matters not only for teachers’ well-being but for student success. For example, studies of urban schools have demonstrated strong connections between collaborative cultures and student achievement (e.g., Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Pil & Leana, 2009), and the structure and content of relationships among teachers has been found to be significantly predictive of students’ learning outcomes (Leana & Pil, 2006).

Thus, another finding from Gallup’s research is even more worrisome: Nearly 70% of the nation’s teachers are “not engaged” or are “actively disengaged” in their work (Lopez & Sidhu, 2013). Sadly, disengagement is not unusual in the American workforce, but it is particularly unacceptable in education, as teachers’ energy, resilience, and caring most directly affect student motivation, engagement, and achievement.

At the start of their peer observation cycles, many students spoke of the barren and individualized culture of their schools. While they reported many challenges in conducting the observation cycles, the most daunting of those challenge was finding peers willing to participate. Colleagues simply turned them down outright, claiming they were uninterested or too busy to attend pre- and post-meetings. According to one student, a colleague told her, in all sincerity, that she didn’t have “anything to show” her, implying that she viewed observation as a means of judging her performance not an opportunity for inquiry and development.

As I began preparing this article, I contacted Bridget to ask if she had any updates on the peer observation practices happening at her school now, two years after she wrote so positively about the results of observing Lia’s classes. Her response described some ongoing collaboration between her department and Lia’s, but it also included an alarming description of the culture in her department and its effect on shared, professional inquiry:

Many of the teachers in my department have openly discussed their unwillingness to work with those who have different styles or levels of experience. . . . No one wants to appear vulnerable when a score is attached to their name, and the threat of it being linked to pay looms ever large in the media.

Teachers are accustomed to being told what they should know and be able to do, and those deemed successful can show high marks on evaluations as “evidence” of their “value.”

Many approaches to professional development and teacher evaluation promote conformity, individualism, and compliance, and scholars such as Tyack (1974) and Lortie (1975) have described the entrenched individualism and privatized practice that have historically characterized school cultures. My experiences confirm that teachers are too rarely supported in investing in the kinds of shared inquiry, embedded professional learning, and collaborative culture building that peer observation cycles facilitate. My hope is that thoughtful, caring, and determined teachers will disrupt these patterns, not only by opening their doors to colleagues but by engaging with them in the kinds of critical reflection, dialogue, and shared innovation my students were able to develop with their peers. Policy support for such practices is long overdue.

References

Advance Illinois. (2012). Making teacher evaluations meaningful: Charlotte Danielson. http://bit.ly/MeaningfulEval

Bryk, A. & Schneider, B. (2002). Trust in schools: A core resource for improvement. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

Cochran-Smith, M. & Lytle, S. (2009). Inquiry as stance. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Glickman, C.D., Gordon, S.P., & Ross-Gordon, J.M. (2013). Supervision and instructional leadership: A developmental approach, 9th ed. Boston, MA: Pearson.

Hargreaves A. & Fullan, M. (2012). Professional capital: Transforming teaching in every school. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Leana, C. & Pil, F.K. (2006). Social capital and organizational performance: Evidence from urban public schools. Organization Science, 17 (3), 353-366. http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1060.0191

Lopez, S.J. & Sidhu, P. (2013). U.S. teachers love their lives but struggle in the workplace. www.gallup.com/poll/161516/teachers-love-lives-struggle-workplace.aspx

Lortie, D.C. (1975). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Pil, F.K. & Leana, C. (2009). Applying organizational research to public school reform. Academy of Management Journal, 52 (6), 1101-1124.

Tyack, D.B. (1974). The one best system. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Whitford, B.L. & Wood, D.R. (Eds.). (2010). Teachers learning in community: Realities and possibilities. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

 

Originally published in March 2017 Phi Delta Kappan 98 (6), 13-18. © 2017 Phi Delta Kappa International. All rights reserved.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Kathleen A. Reilly

KATHLEEN A. REILLY is an assistant professor of education at Towson University, Towson, Md.