Following up on my last post, let's dive in to being oberved as a model for teacher improvement and teacher evaluation. Next time we'll look at the flip side - teachers observing for improvement.

As I mentioned last time, I'm writing about New York City public schools but would be interested in hearing what things are like in other locations and other types of institutions.

Evaluation and improvement - that's the line but it's rarely the case. It's almost never really about teacher improvement and for evaluation, well, boxes are checked and contracts fulfilled but I'm not convinced that even in evaluation, they do more than that.

I recently saw someone post a comment about observaitons noting that "as long as your administration is reasonable or better, they're not really a big deal."

I think this is accurate and we'll see why soon but there are cases where observations are weaponized.

My first chairman absolutely loved me. I was a solid young teacher but he treated me like I was the greatest thing since Betty White. He even wrote up in one of my evaluations "this lesson was a perfect as a lesosn could be" which was patently wrong - it was a solid lesson and I daresay a really good "delivered by a beginner" lesson but it was nowhere near perfect.

The problem with that chair though was that there were other teachers he didn't like at all, including a couple of my mentors and friends. I remember one morning in the Math office when he commented to me on the way out, "I'm going to get Bob today." Bob being a stand in name for the real teacher's name. The implication was that he was going to go in to observe him with the plan of writing up a bad report.

This really scarred me. I taught for over thirty years and was observed countless time. I never received a bad writeup in all that time, although once, in those early years, that chair came into my classroom, saw it was "one of those days" and noped right out since he liked me, but for all my time as a teacher, I always tightened up when my supervisor came in.

Now, I say I never received a bad writeup but not all my observed lessons were winners. Early on when at Stuy, I was observed in a couple of "meh" lessons but my chairman there, Richard Rothenberg was much gentler. He honestly tried to make it about teacher improvement and just really liked watching his teachers teach. One lesson, I was just severely underestimating my classes potential and Richie gently nudged me along while really working hard to not make me feel bad about it. Another time, he felt that my lesson could be enriched with outside materials and that led to an ongoing conversation about math enrichment and context materials and I became a better teacher for it.

Still, I would always freeze up.

Getting back to why observations don't work for either evaluation or improvement, let's start with the burden on the observer.

In a small high school of about 100 kids per grade, give or take, you'll have around 17 teachers - probably more like 20. When I was teaching high school, everyone was observed 6 times a semester though if you were tenured, 4 of the 6 would be partial period rather than full.

That's over 100 observations.

That same small school has one principal and one assistant principal, maybe a second AP but they probably also have more than 20 teachers anyway so let's say 1 principal and 1 AP. There are typically 180 school days each year so that's over 1 observation a day.

Oh, did I mention that every observation has a post ob conference and the full period observations are supposed to have a pre observation conference though that seems to rarely happen.

Then, when it's all done, the supervisor has to write it all up.

Now, don't forget that the principal and AP also have other responsibilities like, oh, I don't know, running the school in general and dealing with every emergency that comes up.

On top of that, in a small school, the likelihood is that the supervisor isn't going to know much about the subject they're observing.

Is it any surprise that this model fails in terms of teacher improvement and is, in schools with "reasonable or better" administrations pretty much box checking lip service.

The other major problem with the observation model is that it's a snapshot without context. I've heard that some teachers, in schools with bad admins have an "observation" lesson ready to go and when the supervisor came in, that lesson would come out.

I actually sort of did this but not really.

NYC DOE at one point started using the Danielson Framework for observations. As a teacher evaluation tool, it's garbage. Even Danielson has repeatedly said this (and she kept saying it all the way to the bank). The Framework has dozens of areas of expertise that teachers are supposed to exhibit. Far too many to keep track of so our school decided on a subset that supervisors would look for as check boxes for observations.

Well, to start, think about how ridiculous that is - what if I teach a great lesson that emphasizes the other areas of Danielson's framework? If that happened, my lesson would be unsatisfactory. I was actually talking to a colleague once and she said she hated the framework. I asked why since what they were looking for fit this teacher like a glove. She replied - it's only a matter of time until they change it and then I'll all of a sudden be a bad teacher.

In any event, I had a great chairman and we'd have an unspoken game we'd play when I was observed. We both knew my lesson would be fine so my chair would look for one or two Danielson points to "ding" me on and I'd try to cover them all while hiding one or two so they weren't obvious.

It was all in good fun.

One year, one of the categories was redirecting a student question to another student. During the post ob, my chair pointed out that I didn't cover that. Now I forget what I did, but I did something convoluted to hide it but specifically put in an instance of redirecting a student question to another question. I pointed it out. I won that round. I list others but again, this was a game we played.

The truth is, we also spoke about the lesson in general and that was valuable. We did the Danielson nonsense because the DOE required it but then we just talked shop.

And that actually brings me back to the beginning. The entire model is horribly flawed so is mostly just a check off in a decent school and unfortunately, a weapon in a bad one but for all the money spent and wasted on Danielson and refining how teachers are observed, my first chairman gave me guidance that I always tried to follow.

He understood that all sorts of lessons can be good and can be bad. One of my colleagues was big on cooperative learning so that's how he framed most lessons. That didn't work so well for me so while I might incorporate some "cooperative learning" concepts, by lessons would look very different. He said that when observing you just have to ask "is learning happening." And then as the observer you have to figure out where and why. If you can't you discuss that with the teacher.

Simple but it's always served me well.

It was reinforced very late in my career. I was talking to my current principal and they were talking about a certain legendary teacher. They commented "I can never bring any DOE officials into his class because we all know he's one of the best teachers in the school but he doesn't do things the way they expect them to be done."

I'll finish off with a couple of observation alternatives that existed when I started teaching but seemed to fall to the wayside. They may still exist in other schools but I just don't know.

One was the video observation. For one of my three each semester, I was allowed to video tape a lesson (yes, it was tape back then), watch it, then watch it again with my supervisor for the official observation.

That took more time but it was actually pretty valuable if you could get over the cringe inducing moments when rewatching the lesson for the official part.

The other was that we could do a peer observation for one of each three. I'd first conference with a colleague, we'd then observe each other, conference again with each other and then finally all meet with the supervisor for an official debriefing.

This was also really good but took much more time and coordination was tough.

So that's being observed in NYC public schools. Like I said at the top, I'd love to hear what's done elsewhere and if it's any better for either improvement or evaluation.

Next up, we'll talk about teachers observing other teachers for improvement - the thing that Mark's initial post was really about that got me started on this rabbit hole.