Tips for Collegial and Effective Lesson Visits

We are working to create a "whole school" vision and approach by involving pairs of middle and senior leaders across ages, subjects and even languages in shared lesson observations.

It’s important to get the culture right in your school so that observations or lesson visits are viewed as developmental as opposed to judgmental or a top down process.

Here are a few suggestions to enhance the system for lesson observation:

1. Plan the observation together

In order to be truly developmental, observations should be ‘done with’, not ‘done to’. Select a pre-determined area of focus based on prior knowledge of an individual’s practice and/or the school’s focus for that term. We focus on specifics, such as the start or end of learning blocks, varied and effective questioning, challenge and extension...

2. Make use of a common framework

A school system which has agreed prompts and judgement criteria, working protocols and clearly defined expected outcomes will be in a very strong position to influence teaching positively. (For English or British Curricula schools) any national framework used should also take the new Ofsted focus into consideration and in particular consider how education flows from intention to implementation and finally to impact within a school.

3. Be an active observer -

Talk to pupils to gauge their opinion and don’t just rely on one source of evidence (i.e. the lesson itself). Ask to see books and lesson plans. Make notes on everything seen (remembering to record strengths as well as development points) and refine these after the observation.

4. Evaluate outcomes together -

Schedule a ‘Professional Learning Conversation’ after the observation. Share draft notes beforehand so that both parties have chance to reflect before the meeting.

5. Agree next steps -

Lesson observation is pointless if it doesn’t provide the observed staff member with actionable development points. Consider CPD and what training might be beneficial. Also remember to look out for the impact of previous training sessions, are teachers using ideas shared (how many and how often)?.

6. Repeat -

Reliability is linked to consistency and the number of lessons seen and one-time observations are open to error. A greater number of observations is required when a teacher is receiving developmental feedback rather than being simply “evaluated”.