Lesson Observations

Following on from last week’s musings on Perfomarmance Management, let’s take a look at the other bit to PM – having a lesson observed.

Lesson observations are weird. They are undoubtedly nerve wracking, but they shouldn’t be. See, the problem is teachers work in isolation most of the time. Sure we have the 30 (or more!) students looking at us, but we rarely have other adults in the room. This was definitely the case for the first twenty plus years of my career, but things are changing.

When I started teaching, you maybe got observed twice a year. These were full lesson, one person watching and giving feedback. This model is obviously flawed, as it leaves teachers open to personal vendettas (and believe me, this has happened) and purely objective thinking such as ‘that’s not the way I would do it’. Like, who cares if you wouldn’t do it that way? I wouldn’t eat my sandwich with my mouth open, but people do and the food still does its job.

Nowadays, if you get observed, it’s usually two people in the room for about 20 minutes (or drop ins, more on which later). This is enough time to check instructions, behaviour, have a quick look at books and generally see how things are going. For me, this approach works – you have two perspectives, so personal biases¹ tend to be removed and usually one of the observors is a subject specialist, which is vital.

I’ve observed many, many lessons over the years, most good, some great, some really poor. Luckily the completely rubbish lessons are hugely on the decline, which is great for the profession and even better for students².

I’ve also been observed, which usually went well, but one time I had a tricky³ year 11 group and the lesson before I’d taught expanding double brackets. For the observation I had planned to do factorising. We had a new head teacher, who was observing with our new head of teaching and learning, so it had to be good. I did my starter, otherwise known as a recall activitiy before they were called that, then launched into ‘Last lesson we expanded brackets so today we’re reversing the process’. I had a couple of quadratic expressions on the board, and a reminder of how to expand double brackets. I started with the reminder at which point a girl, who had definitely been in the previous lesson, said very loudly ‘I have never seen that before in my life.’ As she was a popular girl, lots of other students joined in, and like that my carefully planned lesson was blown out of the water right in front of my new boss. Cheers!

A guy I used to work with was notorious for being late to lessons, plus talking too much. He was observed by an OFSTED inspector and went for feedback⁴. He then came to see me and said ‘You must be really good at your job.’ Now, we’d been working together for about 10 years at this point, so it was nice to know he’d only just come to that conclusion. I asked him why and he said ‘that inspector just told me the same things you’ve been saying for years.’ Great, how about you act on it then?

This last story indicates what is wrong with appraisal and lesson observations. They very rarely make a difference and teachers slip back into bad habits. A coaching approach of regular drop-ins is far more effective in actually changing practice and making sure skills are constantly improving and developing. Any teacher who thinks they can’t improve some area of their practice is either amazing (rare) or deluded.

Which brings me to the current model of lots of drop-ins. It works like this. A member of SLT⁵ will sweep into your room unnannounced, armed with an iPad. They tick a load of boxes and then swoop out again. Usually this is less than five minutes so there is no requirement for written feedback. As I’ve said, I don’t think this is right and every drop-in should lead to some sort of written feedback, even if that’s just ‘I really liked the way you…’

It is also (obviously) important to be honest. Tell people what was good, then move on to what they could improve. A student’s GCSE result is dependent on great teaching after all, so why would you not want to upskill the teachers in your care. Whenever I’m mentoring teachers, I always suggest a learning walk – let’s go see some teachers and see what work and what doesn’t. It is important to acknoweldge that some approaches will work well for some but not others.

As an example, an ex-colleague (and good friend, so hopefully he won’t mind me telling this story), tried to tackle students turning up to his lessons without calculators. He said ‘You wouldn’t go to the Playboy Mansion without a condom, so don’t come to my lesson without a calculator!’

Surrisingly, zero parental complaints after that one!

Until next time.

1. Hah! ↩︎
2. This should go without saying, but some teachers do need reminding about the core part of their job. ↩︎
3. Teacher speak for badly behaved, zero motivation. ↩︎
4. Bizarrely OFSTED don’t give specific lesson feedback, which is outrageous really. Any time you observe a colleague, they should get feedback even if it’s just one line. ↩︎
5. Usually the least qualified to actually give any feedback on how to improve your lesson. Oooh, bitchy! ↩︎