There is a common misconception that many school leaders, whether they examine it or not, accept a teacher’s teaching ability in the first weeks of a new school year. It is rarely stated plainly, because stated plainly it sounds foolish. The misconception holds that a teacher, once hired with care, onboarded with kindness, and dispatched to a sufficient number of conferences, is thereby a finished thing. Nobody would say this out loud. The average headmaster subject to this view, who is a decent person and means well, would deny it if you asked him directly. Yet he goes on behaving as though the whole business of making a teacher better is completed the moment her contract is signed, and can only afterward be topped off, like a gasoline tank, by pouring in more lectures.
This is a strange theory of human skill, when you consider that we apply it nowhere else. Nobody expects a man to become a better carpenter by attending a course of lectures on carpentry while sitting on his hands. Nobody expects a boxer to improve his footwork by listening to a talk about footwork, however excellent the talk, while sitting quite still with his gloves in his lap. We know, when it comes to boxing and carpentry, that a man gets better at the thing by doing the thing, badly at first, in front of somebody who can see what he cannot see in himself and is honest enough to say so. It is only in the essential business of teaching the young that we have persuaded ourselves otherwise.
A school that wants an excellent faculty needs regular, ongoing coaching to hone its teachers’ pedagogical skill and attentiveness, their presence in the room, and their practical wisdom for leading it.
But what does this look like in practice? Simply put, coaching a faculty looks a great deal like teaching piano. A piano teacher does not visit her pupil once a year for four hours, hand him a list of everything he might improve, and call it instruction. She listens for ten minutes a week, for years, and gives him one new skill or sheet of music to work on. Each session she marks his improvement, repeats old advice as needed, drills a technique, sets a new goal, often even models the right way to play the keys herself. Sometimes she listens to an entire piece, and sometimes to a single measure, depending on what she is looking for, whether it be consistent tempo or a single delicate movement of the fingers.
A school’s system for observation and feedback runs along the same lines, with three types of observation, each optimized for a specific purpose. First there is the long-form observation, thirty minutes or more, followed by extensive written feedback. Most schools already do this much, once a semester or once a year, but due to time constraints, this type is necessarily rare. It is useful for formal evaluation but does little to inspire or drive growth. Real coaching and formation happen through the other two types. The short-form observation, ten or fifteen minutes twice a month or so, occurs regularly enough that nobody dreads it because they’ve come to expect it. Lastly, administrators conduct micro-observations in two minutes or less when they simply look in on one moment of a class, a single routine or habit, or the aesthetic order of the room. This last kind can happen almost daily and costs nothing but the trouble of walking down the corridor.
Once the observation takes place, it’s time to offer feedback. The follow-up conversation ought to last about as long as the observation did—fifteen minutes for short-form, two minutes for micro—and take place within the same day or week while the lesson is still fresh in the memory. The observer’s job is to say plainly what he saw, narrowed to the one or two things that matter most, in the spirit of speaking the truth in love rather than delivering a verdict. The best of these conversations begin from curiosity and goodwill rather than accusation, and end with a single action step the two of them have agreed on together, something concrete enough to be attempted before the next visit. Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, in Leverage Leadership, adds that the action step should be written down so that both parties remember it, and so that patterns become visible over time.
A faculty encountering this practice for the first time will very likely be wary of it, and understandably so. Nobody warms instantly to the idea of a superior appearing in the doorway on a regular basis. The wariness is best met head on by explaining plainly why the thing is being done and what good it will bring, rather than by pretending it is not uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable, at least at first, but there is no version of growth that isn’t. Iron sharpens iron, as the old proverb has it, and the sharpening is not gentle. What a faculty needs to hear, and hear often, is that the whole business is formative rather than evaluative. It is not a grade handed down at the end of the year, but a coach’s aside between innings, meant to help rather than to judge.
A school that believes a teacher is finished the day she is hired will never think to watch her again, and a school that never watches its adults teach its children, more surely than any lecture could, that growth is a thing you outgrow. A school that believes otherwise, that a teacher’s craft is built the way any craft is built, through practice, correction, and time, has no honest choice but to build a culture of observation around that belief. This asks something of everyone in the building. It asks the administrator to become good, slowly and by his own mistakes, at a delicate craft of his own: watching attentively, speaking with charity, and returning to each classroom often enough that each visit breeds trust rather than unease. It asks the faculty to be watched without flinching and corrected without mistaking correction for contempt. And it asks both of them, together, to show the children that excellence is a worthy and lifelong pursuit.