If we want to see meaningful results from our time in classrooms, it’s only logical that we commit to an adequate dose for our efforts. Kim Marshall (2013) notes that administrators are not present for 99.9 percent of the instruction that takes place in classrooms, yet are responsible for obtaining enough information to evaluate teachers fairly. In sampling terms, visiting a classroom only once or twice per year gives an administrator a very limited perspective on a teacher’s practice. Grissom et al. (2013) found that time spent coaching teachers is associated with higher student achievement in mathematics. Yet, they also found that, on average, only 0.5 percent of principals’ time was devoted to coaching teachers, which can be expected to produce student learning gains of less than 0.05 percent of a standard deviation—far too small a difference to notice. We must visit teachers frequently if we want to have a noticeable impact on their practice.
We must visit teachers frequently if we want to have a noticeable impact on their practice.
How often is often enough? It depends on the nature of your role and the number of teachers you supervise. A two-week rotation—visiting every teacher you supervise every other week—strikes a balance between frequency and practicality for most school-based administrators who are responsible for evaluating teachers. If you visit 10 percent of your teachers daily in a 180-day school year, you’ll reach everyone approximately eighteen times, not including formal observations or other types of visits to classrooms. Depending on how many teachers you supervise, this will typically require two to four visits per day. If you’re part of an administrative team that shares evaluation responsibilities, plan to visit only the teachers you supervise.
However, if you supervise an especially large number of teachers, or if you’re not in a school-based administrative role, it may not be feasible to establish a two-week rotation. Instead, focus on a daily target of three visits, or a weekly target of fifteen visits. On the other hand, if you’re a coach providing intensive support to a group of five new teachers, your visit frequency will be higher. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll treat three visits per day as a standard target throughout this book.
Make Brief Visits
In order to form a sustainable habit, it’s essential to keep your classroom visits brief. Frequent visits become virtually impossible to sustain if they swell to thirty minutes or more. As the length of a visit increases, the chance of scheduling conflicts and interruptions multiplies dramatically. Additionally, school 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