Month: July 2026 (page 1 of 1)

Our current “system” of education is actually hodgepodge of different competing organizations layered on top of each other. It’s not actually a system at all.

If you compared our system for professional learning to a relay race where each organization in a teacher’s career should pass the baton of learning to the next organization, it’s instead like a race with people running in different directions and there’s no baton in sight.

Our system for student learning is slightly better, if only because students tend to stay within the same school for a number of years and schools tend to be a bit better about internal consistency across year levels. Still, in most schools what a child knows about a topic from the year before is almost always lost by the time the related topics come up in the following year. In fact, despite the fact schools collect mountains of information on each child in a year, most of it is discarded before the following year. Remember, every worksheet a child does contains information about their performance at a moment in time.

Our systems for connecting educator learning to student learning are at best aspirational, with almost no schools anywhere linking the two. When was the last time you heard in a staff meeting, “We see students need support with ____ so we need to learn ____”? It’s just not done. In the best schools, teachers get autonomy to decide what to learn based on reflecting on their work with students, and in the worst, educator professional learning is neither professional nor does it result in learning.

We need a stable set of goals for students, so that we can measure student progress toward those goals and make decisions from that information. We need agreement on the relative importance of those goals, so that we stop shifting goalposts year after year. We need to create our system by working up from student learning and not down from ministries of education, so that every link in the chain of the system is built carefully based on evidence of impact.

Now that I’ve been coaching math teachers again, I have been in a lot more classrooms and doing classroom observations again.

In a past iteration as a math coach¹ , I created this checklist of things² to look for explicitly when observing teachers. The goal at the time was to be able to have our team have a clear list of observable behaviours so that we could measure whether our professional learning work was landing with teachers. With 8 instructional coaches and 30 schools in our project, we needed something that would work at scale.

We created curricular resources for teachers, ran workshops for teachers to teach them how to use the curricular resources (via modeling, rehearsals, and dialogue), and then coached the teacher leads at the schools. We would then observe teachers in their classrooms and teacher leads in their meetings, so that we could learn whether our work was landing. Over time, we iterated and improved our approach as we learned from what we did.

As an individual coach though, my goals for lesson observations are tied to the coaching work I do with teachers. The teacher I’m coaching and I decide together what I should focus on when observing them, and I spend much more time learning alongside the teacher instead of just sitting back and passively observing their classrooms.

I’ve since been heavily influenced by Elham Kazemi’s (et al.³) Learning Together so that instead of trying to transmit what I know to the teachers I work with, I work with teachers to try out different strategies to see what works with these students in this context, focused heavily on instructional goals informed by our conversations, data we have collected, and the goals of the school. I still do typical coaching ‘moves’ such as modeling instruction, observations, and leading team meetings, but these are in service of our shared learning.

Neither of these approaches are better than the other. They are meant to serve different types of structures and sets of resources available. But both are meant to serve the main goal — the learning of teachers in service of student learning. One’s strategy for coaching should match the available resources one has and the goals one has for that coaching.

I like Graham Nuthall’s definition of learning as ‘long-term changes in what learners know, believe, and can do.’ From this definition, we can see that one cannot directly observe student or teacher learning from a single lesson observation; all one can observe in learners are behaviours that are likely to lead to learning. Lesson observations therefore also have to be paired with collection of other kinds of data, including student performance data collected over the long term, and data about changes in teacher practice that are sustained.

Either approach therefore will require a longer term view. It’s hard to see if long term changes are making an impact as well, as one needs both a control year (how much did students change this year) and a treatment year (under this new strategy, how much did students change). You also need time to see if the strategies you and teachers learn stick, since you are learners too! My recommendation is to make sure to study the impact of your work and repeatedly iterate on both your coaching approach and the teaching strategies your team tries, until you see the results you want.

School culture trumps great teaching, or it can.

When teachers try to teach the way they think is best, they do so while navigating the culture of the school and community where they work. What is considered excellent teaching is dependent on both the school culture and the dominant culture the students come from⁴.

Our personal set of values informs how we teach, and the set of values a school community values informs what they consider good teaching. Consequently, comparing your personal values to the lived (rather than the espoused ⁵) values of a school is a good way of figuring out whether you are a good fit for a school.

If you are an educator considering transitioning to a new school, here are some questions you can ask to see if your set of values will mesh well with the school’s culture.

• What level of technology is expected in your teaching?
• How much flexibility do educators have in selecting their curricular resources?
• When one enters a classroom and everything is going smoothly, what does one see?
• How does the school support students with behaviour?
• What support exists at the school for students with special needs?
• What supports exist for teachers?

The answer to these questions will speak to what the school values, and you can use the answers to help yourself determine if you are a good fit for the school culture.