The basic model for teacher improvement has three assumptions.
- We should train teachers effectively before they start their careers. If the current round of teachers has problems, we try and address those problems in the future generation of teachers by modifying the pre-service training they receive.
- Teachers need to be observed regularly by trained professions to ensure they are using best practices.
- Professional development is an occasional activity in which teachers engage wherein they learn all about the latest best practices in education.
None of these assumptions is actually completely true, nor are they sufficient to improve our education system.
The problem with the first assumption is that the feedback system for improving teacher education of pre-service teachers is incredibly slow. So slow in fact, that despite the current revolution in our information technology, virtually none of these changes has made its way into mainstream teacher education. Only 5 out of 9 teacher education programs in BC even include any kind of technology training for teachers. While we can argue that technology is not necessary for teaching, at the very least the arguments both for and against the use of technology in education should be shared with pre-service teachers. There are other areas in which teacher education programs suffer, technology education is just one example. We can therefore expect this model of improving the practice of teachers to be insufficient.
The problem with the second assumption is that observation of practice doesn’t actually lead to improvement. One can argue that the process of evaluation is intended to measure the current effectiveness of a teacher so as to better support their future learning of their craft, but rarely is enough time allotted for teachers to actually improve what they do. We apportion professional learning into meetings or workshops held a few times a year, but very rarely is any time given to teachers to focus on improving their practices in their area of need.
The reasons why professional development is an occasional task is primarily because of the expense involved. It is expense to release teachers from a day off of teaching to go to a workshop, both because of the lost instructional time, the cost of a substitute teacher, and the costs associated with the conference itself. In British Columbia, we have 5 professional development days for teachers in the public system. In the private system, teachers often have only 2 days for professional development as a group, but have much more funding for engaging in more personalized professional development through attending conferences and workshops.
However, both of these systems for professional development assume that access the information teachers need to improve is expensive and difficult to find. For those of us involved in professional learning through Twitter, we know that this isn’t true. You can easily learn from your peers around the world any time you want, provided you have access to a social network, and time to access it.
This doesn’t mean that the professional learning that is already occuring in British Columbia is pointless, it certainly serves as a way to establish norms for our education system, and for those in charge to share their perspectives on what works in education. However it is insufficient as a way to ensure continuing teacher improvement.
Here is a simple change. Instead of an administrator infrequently evaluating teachers, teachers should observe teachers (and more importantly the whole classroom) frequently. In this case, both the observee and the observed learn from the experience, provided they have time to deconstruct it afterwards. If you do this often enough, teachers will naturally improve their practice as they will have much more feedback about what is working or not working as compared to a system where they receive occasional evaluations. I have done this myself as a teacher, and have watched hundreds of my colleagues teach, which has definitely improved my own teaching. We must be careful not to tie peer observations to an evaluation system, lest we end up creating a peer surveillance system!
Clearly novice teachers will benefit from this model. You can see my post on the apprenticeship model of teaching, for another model of pre-service training. However if veteran teachers observe beginning teachers (and offer support) they will also learn about new practices in education themselves that were part of the beginning teacher’s pre-service training. An experienced educator should be able to take a new educational practice, even one wielded by a novice, and implement it effectively in their own teaching.
The only issue I see with this system is teachers would need time to participate in peer observations. I would argue that the benefits of allowing teachers the time to observe each other every couple of weeks would outweigh the lost instructional time. There is much educational waste that occurs wherein teachers use practices to teach students which are clearly ineffective to an outside observer; sometimes even a small improvement in what teachers do would make a large improvement on the effectiveness of the remaining instructional time.
I would argue then that peer observation is far more powerful a tool than administrator observations. While observations from administrators, as experienced educators, are an important tool in improving teaching practicing and for aligning those teaching practices with the expectations of the school, they are not enough to accomplish a primary goal of teacher observation, improving instruction.
Sylvia says:
Interesting that I find this tweeted article on the evening of writing my own blog regarding feedback (input vs. output), providing feedback to presenters at a master training course, and preparing to observe and conference with new teachers regarding their classroom practices. Our district hired 150-180 successful, veteran teachers to be full-release mentors and peers to do exactly what you suggest as being most valuable. As a result, though, I must agree. Not all feedback leads to improvement … the observed teacher needs to be willing to receive feedback as much as the observer cares enough to provide accurate, honest feedback.
That’s how I see it. 🙂
May 2, 2011 — 10:00 pm
David Wees says:
I think it is also key that inexperienced teachers spend time doing the observing. We teach through modelling appropriate (and inappropriate) practices, so both the process of being observed and being the observer are useful for learning.
May 4, 2011 — 10:56 am
Ms. Bayles says:
I think that instead of one day of professional development, teachers get paid for the equivalent amount of prep time (so in a high school with four periods in a regular school day that would equal four prep periods). These four prep periods are then spent observing other teachers in their classrooms. This way the observer can learn about the teaching style of another teacher and at the same offer suggestions to the teacher whose lesson they watched. Even doing this for just two of the professional development days would allow teachers to spread out their observations to about one per month during the school year. The additional benefit of this is that it will form relationships among colleagues and probably encourage even more unofficial professional development as a result.
Students would not miss out on class time as a result of this (less days off for professional development), but it would put added pressure on teachers to spend even more of their evenings on prep by losing those prep periods.
May 3, 2011 — 8:27 pm
David Wees says:
As I said in our discussion on Twitter, I don’t think that 4 observations would be enough, but it would be a good transistion between the system we have in British Columbia and a system where we observe each other much more frequently.
May 4, 2011 — 10:54 am
Jessie Krefting says:
One thing I’ve participated in was called “Around (school name) World”. The premise was that our principal would come into our classrooms for a block and teach our kids while we were released to go and observe and provide feedback to our peers about a lesson they taught or the interactions we saw taking place amongst the students as well as the student and the teacher. I found this very valuable but it is challenging to remember to not take things personally!!
May 4, 2011 — 9:18 am
David Wees says:
It’s my experience that we tend to take feedback more personally, the less of it we receive. So if you were being observed by your colleagues more frequently, you would probably find both that the feedback they provided became more useful & constructive, and that you would be more comfortable receiving some negative feedback about your performance. It is scariest to receive feedback from our peers, which is part of the reason why it is most valuable. It is easy to blow off a poor evaluation by an administrator as "that person doesn’t know what they are talking about" but more difficult to dismiss criticism from your peers.
May 4, 2011 — 10:53 am
Mandi Adkins says:
I find this blog to be very interesting because the county where I teach we do lots of peer observations. I know at my school our teachers love it. We have not seen it as a negative process. I am lead mentor at my school, which means I am over all the new teachers and their mentors. At the beginning of the year when we first learned we had to do this, I videoed myself teaching a reading lesson. Then I had all my peers watch the video and observe my lesson and critique my teaching. It was a wonderful experience not only for them but also for myself. They learned from me as well as I learned from them. It seems more valuable and useful when you hear criticism or praise from your peers because you understand they do the same thing you do every day. I find peer observations to be much more of a learning tool than any kind of professional development teachers can attend because both the observer and the observee are learning.
July 10, 2011 — 12:58 pm