schedules often break down into five- or even one-minute increments, creating awkward blocks of time. Fitting half-hour or longer visits into a schedule full of passing periods, recesses, and lunch periods is a formidable challenge. The odds you’d be able to stay in a classroom for most of a lesson without interruption, three times a day, every day, are slim indeed.
The solution is to keep your visits brief enough to be practical, but long enough to be meaningful. A one- to three-minute visit may be long enough to make an appearance, but it’s not long enough to provide you with the information you’ll need to have a substantive conversation with the teacher. For most visits, five to fifteen minutes tends to be the sweet spot, with rapidly diminishing returns beyond the fifteen-minute mark. Marshall (2013) notes that “After five or ten minutes, the amount of new information levels off and then gradually declines for the remainder of the period” (p. 66). I have sometimes found it worthwhile to stay a bit longer to see the conclusion of an activity, but it usually takes less than ten minutes to see enough to fuel a substantive conversation. If you arrive during a time that won’t lead to a useful conversation—say, because students are taking a test—you can stay a bit longer or come back later, but as a rule of thumb, ten minutes is a reasonable goal to strive for.
Make Substantive Visits
For a classroom visit to make a difference in your leadership and in the teacher’s practice, it must focus on significant issues of teaching and learning. However, you will need to develop relationships with teachers before this will be possible. You’ll want to initiate your first cycle of visits in a nonthreatening manner that builds trust, and this may mean that conversations in your first cycle are less substantive than you’d like. After your initial round of visits to classrooms, though, you’ll be able to delve deeper in these conversations so you can gain insight into teachers’ decision making and strengthen your understanding of teacher and student needs.
One caution is in order: the imperative to make our visits substantive doesn’t mean we always need to provide suggestions for improvement. In fact, making suggestions to teachers following brief visits is often counterproductive (Danielson, 2015). Rather than striving to “fix” teachers’ lessons by pointing out minor opportunities for improvement, our focus should be on discussing—verbally and in writing—the dynamics at work in the classroom, with reference to a shared set of expectations, such as a curriculum guide or teacher evaluation rubric. Through this dialogue, we stand a much better chance of having a positive impact on students.
Make Open-Ended Visits
These visits to classrooms should result in learning for both the teacher and the instructional leader, but I didn’t design them to produce a rating of the teacher or the lesson. While every educator has a personal understanding of what a good lesson should look like, the reality is that a single visit doesn’t provide enough information for a sound evaluation of the lesson’s overall effectiveness. As the instructional leader and teacher talk about what happened in the lesson—in a brief conversation or perhaps via email later—the focus should be on whether the lesson was effective in achieving the teacher’s aims, which may be more complex than a visitor can ascertain during one visit. This requires that the instructional leader observe with an open mind and treat the teacher as the expert (Danielson, 2015).
Too often, supervisors march into classrooms, clipboards in hand, and rate elements such as lesson design, instructional strategies, student grouping, student engagement, and countless other aspects of teaching without attending to the essential question of whether the lesson accomplishes what the teacher intends. This leads to frustration and resistance from teachers who may be genuinely interested in feedback—if they have a say in what they’d like feedback on. If we enter each classroom with an open mind, we can focus on addressing the issues that are most relevant to the teacher. For example, if a lesson is effective at helping students achieve the selected learning targets, but those targets aren’t rigorous enough, prescribing a different instructional technique won’t help because increasing rigor is a planning issue. When we seek to understand the teacher’s approach and consider it on its own merits, we can have more substantive, impactful conversations that change teacher practice in meaningful ways and result in higher levels of learning for students.
Make Evidence-Based Visits
The goal of classroom visits in the high-performance instructional leadership model is to obtain firsthand information from the classroom—where the work of teaching and learning is taking place—to inform subsequent conversations and decisions. When an instructional leader gives only a vague description of what happened in the lesson, such as “Students were not paying attention while you gave instructions,” it’s difficult to map the relationships between teacher actions and students’ experience. Richly descriptive evidence, on the other hand, can lead to deeper explorations of the impact instruction is having on student learning.
Taking descriptive, low-inference notes can both help you recall what happened and give the teacher—who was too busy teaching to take his or her own notes—a record of what transpired. For example, if you noted that one group of students was talking, and the teacher immediately went and worked with that group to get them started, this low-inference evidence can lead to a richer discussion than a more judgmental comment such as “Students were not paying attention.” Equipped with this written record, both parties can remain open to new interpretations of the lesson based on their conversation.
The goal of classroom visits in the high-performance instructional leadership model is to obtain firsthand information from the classroom—where the work of teaching and learning is taking place—to inform subsequent conversations and decisions.
Because the word evidence may have negative connotations for teachers, you may wish to simply refer to your written records as notes.
Make Criterion-Referenced Visits
Descriptive evidence doesn’t stand on its own; it only gains meaning within a set of shared expectations. These shared expectations are drawn from teacher evaluation rubrics, professional standards, curriculum, professional development, strategic plans, and other resources that collectively define professional practice and performance for teachers at your school. We’ll refer to these expectations collectively as the instructional framework that teachers and instructional leaders share.
Even an evidence-based conversation can devolve into little more than philosophizing if it’s not anchored in a shared instructional framework. When the instructional framework takes on the role of defining effective practice, the instructional leader can step out of the role of judge and into a more collegial role. When the framework becomes like a third participant in the conversation between teacher and instructional leader, the discussion can become less focused on evaluation and more focused on evidence-based insights.
It’s important to distinguish between a shared instructional framework and an observation checklist or rating tool. Some instructional frameworks’ criteria describe practice writ large, not individual lessons or activities within a lesson. Not everything that characterizes effective practice will be visible in a single lesson, so we must resist the tendency to turn overall evaluation criteria into observation criteria. Additionally, many sources of shared expectations, such as curriculum guides, are not designed to evaluate teachers, but rather to aid teacher decisionmaking. Rather than using the language of your instructional framework to rate teachers during your visits, you’ll find it most helpful to use this language as the vocabulary of professional conversation.
Make Conversation-Oriented Visits
The immediate goal of spending time in classrooms is to inform the follow-up conversation that must then take place, either face to face or via email. In this conversation, you can provide firsthand observations
