Back in for the evening. Not in Barcelona anymore - spending a few days now in Madrid. Sadly, I got a message from a fellow CS Educator who lives in Barcelona the day we left so if any reader out there is in Madrid - I'm hear a couple more days - let me know.

For the post at hand, I read this post the other day by Mark Guzdial and it got me thinking about a number of things. The difference in educator development between K12 and college, how teachers are and aren't improved, and specifically, observations as that was a core part of Mark's post.

Since I'm just in from a long day of walking and touristing and there's a HUGE amount to cover, I think I'll just lay out how observations, in my experience, are and arn't used and then dig deeper in future posts, probably when I'm back in New York.

As a public school teacher in New York, the primary method of being evaluated is observation - you're observed by your supervisor. In my case, it was usually my department chair but in a smaller school it might be the principal or any assistant principal.

Traditionally, assistant principals and principals taught for many years before moving into administration but under the Bloomberg Administration, they fast tracked non educators into the positions so you might be observed by someone who just had a couple of years in the classroom. Hardly ideal.

Note that all of this is the principal observing the teacher whereas Mark was talking about an instructor observing another instructor to see what they could glean. I'll talk about that and the relationships between the two in a future post.

Also, I said this was the method by which teachers were evaluated - not improved. The observation plan was supposed to be about teacher improvement but it rarely is. Again, more on this later.

When I started as an untenured, unappointed teacher, I was observed 3 times a semester - 6 a year. Once appointed, which meant that I was officially assigned to a school and was no longer considered term to term, it was once a semester. Finally, once tenured it was once a year.

That changed over time and in my later years it was back to three times a semester or six a year.

As a CS teacher, I was never observed by someone who knew my subject area but still some observations were helpful. Most though were just checking the boxes and not necessarily for bad reasons but again, that's for a later post.

Now note that none of this involves a teacher observing another teacher though that could be done in a limited capacity early in my career. Except for that, it was all top down.

Let's contrast that to college. I can only speak to how things worked at Hunter but I think at least all of CUNY's the same. Once each semester I was observed by a fellow full time faculty member. Each department had it's own way of doing this. Curriculum and Teaching, where I did the observing, had a lengthy form that, to be honest, was pretty worthless. CS, where I was observed, had a much shorter form with checkoffs as well as room for written responses but it was similarly worthless.

Basically, a full time faculty member, who wasn't trained as a teacher, would see me teach one lesson and then write it up. Most saw the lesson, we talked about it then wrote it up. One teacher didn't like some aspects of what I was doing, I found it annoying because the observer was a professor with a reputaton as a bad teacher but it didn't matter because it wasn't going to affect me overall anyway. In any event, it wasn't really about improving instruction, it was really about a cursory check on instructurs.

Neither in K12 nor in college was there any official way of observing other instructors.

So that's the framework on how observations were used over my career.

In future posts I'll dig into:

• The variations on observations in K12
• Teachers observing or sitting in on other teachers
• Why it's tricky to do
• Why it's tricky to get something out of. But I think this is enough for tonight.