How to Ace your Teacher Observation
My World Language Supervisor is coming to my class this week to observe me, and so I’ve recently been thinking about all of the tips, tricks, techniques, and strategies that I’ve picked up over the years of countless observations from many different administrators, and I thought it would be a good idea to share some of my insights. This blog post will be geared primarily toward World Language Teachers (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.), but there will certainly be great tips and takeaways for all content area teachers!
Whether your admin is stopping by for an announced, scheduled observation or whether they decide to pop in for an unannounced or informal observation, performance evaluations can be anxiety-provoking for even the most seasoned educators. We teachers tend to be very territorial of our craft, and so when an admin comes in to evaluate our progress and performance, a whole lot of complicated emotions can rise to the surface.
What if he thinks I talk too much? What if she doesn’t get why I’m using this particular strategy? Am I even a good teacher? What if I’m feeling off on the day of my observation, and I’m not able to perform to the best of my ability? What if my students are sleepy that day and don’t participate as much as they normally do? What if this new lesson or strategy I’m trying out completely flops?!
If you’ve ever felt any level of anxiety or trepidation over your teacher observations in the past, continue reading on, as this blog post is for you!
Teacher Observation Tip #1: Preparation is Key
If you know you are going to be observed, spend some time before your pre-conference thinking about where you are in the curriculum/semester and what skills your students have already mastered, as well as what new skills you could focus on during your observation. Administrators want to see that your students have already developed competency, and they want to see how you’re able to present new content and design effective and engaging learning experiences for your students. Consider starting your class off with a review activity for which you know that your students will be able to demonstrate mastery. Then, move on to some new content so admin gets a good idea of how students learn new material in your class.
You may want to consider writing out a detailed lesson plan to share with your administrator during your pre-conference. I’m not talking about the 5-page lesson plans that we had to write in our Teacher Ed courses that no one actually does as a practicing teacher. I’m talking about a lesson outline with the time/duration of each activity mapped out along with a one-two sentence description of each activity. This helps you to visualize how your lesson will unfold, and your admin will find your forethought and prior preparation to be impressive.
Depending on how long your admin typically stays for an observation, consider overplanning for that lesson. You don’t want to run out of material and be left scrambling for something to do to occupy the last few minutes of your observation. Be frank during your pre-conference that you always keep a few back-up activities in your back pocket in case students progress more quickly through your activities than you had anticipated.
What about unannounced observations? Real talk: not every single lesson or every single teaching day is going to be a grand slam - there are days in which students are working independently while we get caught up on grading. There are days when we feel a bit under the weather and we have students work in pairs or small groups on an assignment or project. (I personally think those are the best types of lessons for admin to walk into, because they show that students are self-directed in your class and can learn AND collaborate without needing constant, direct instruction and/or assistance from the teacher.)
Regardless, if you know your admin wants to see you in front of the room teaching, you should have a couple different go-to observation activities that you can quickly pivot to if your supervisor or principal decides to pop in at an inopportune moment. These activities should be evergreen, meaning that you can use them all-year round, irrespective of the unit you are currently in.
For example, I have a few different Collective Storytelling activities saved on my Google Drive. Essentially, I found interesting and/or quirky images that I’ve saved in a Google Slides presentation. If an administrator walks in, I know that I can project one of those images, give students a few minutes to brainstorm ideas, and then open up a Google Doc that I project on the screen as we co-construct a story in the target language about the picture. I can literally use this activity at ANY POINT in the school year, and for me, it fulfills every effective teaching element that I want admin to see: target language instruction, proficiency-oriented tasks, student-centered focus, student interaction and collaboration.
Teacher Observation Tip #2: Focus on Technique
I’m always amazed when I receive my observation report back from my supervisor. As I teach, she takes down detailed procedural and narrative notes of what is happening in my classroom: the questions I’m asking, the responses students deliver, the number of students who are participating, specifics about the activity or lesson I’m doing… it always makes me think, Wow, I had NO IDEA I was doing all of that… I thought I was just teaching! And the reality is, so many of us have become so comfortable in the classroom that we have internalized effective, sound pedagogy and are able to intuitively integrate best practices of teaching when we’re working with our students.
Administrators want to see you demonstrate sound pedagogical techniques so that they can highlight that in their observation report. Here are some of the major areas I have seen admin focus on in the past:
Questioning Techniques. Are you sprinkling in higher-order questions? Are you asking questions that require critical thinking? Are you asking students to make connections between the target language and English? Are you involving as many students as possible and not simply calling on the same few students over and over again?
Wait Time. When you ask a question, you have to give students time to process the question, formulate a response, and muster the courage to raise their hand! This does not happen in 3 seconds, and it does not happen in 5 seconds. Give your students time to think. I believe that we teachers sometimes erroneously equate silence with disengagement, misunderstanding, or a reticence to participate. But the truth is that students just need time to process. Some of our students raise their hand a few seconds after we’ve posed a question. That’s great, let them sit there with their hand raised as you wait for other students to volunteer. Sit with the silence, as uncomfortable as it might be.
Classroom Community. Most administrators want to get a sense of what your classroom community is like. Do students participate regularly and openly? Do they feel comfortable making mistakes or taking risks in your class? Building a solid classroom community is not a pedagogical technique, per se, but it is an essential component to effective teaching. Students do not learn well from teachers that they do not respect. Your students do not necessarily need to like you all the time, but they need to respect you as a competent and empathetic instructor. Additionally, they need to feel like they belong in your class. Many administrators have commented on the fact that my classroom seems like a warm and inviting space that students genuinely enjoy being in; these compliments have not only made me feel validated as an educator, but they have also undoubtedly had a positive influence on the scores that I’ve received on my observation reports.
It should be noted that many administrators evaluate teachers’ classroom management. From my perspective, classroom management tends to be much easier when you’ve created and maintained a positive classroom community.
Teacher Observation Tip #3: Integrate Assessment into your Lesson
How do you normally know that your students are following along during instruction? I think it’s easy to assess post-instruction in the form of an exit ticket, quiz, or some other formative assessment. But what about during instruction? Sure, you can ask questions… but what else can you do to ensure all of your students are on the same page as you throughout the instructional phase of your lesson?
I want you to consider informal assessment checkpoints that you can build into your lesson. Perhaps you have students do a Think-Pair-Share and report their answers to a few other students seated in their vicinity. Maybe after a few slides of your presentation, you have students log on to do a quick 5-question Kahoot! or Quizizz so you can get really quick data, address any misunderstandings, and provide interventions before you proceed with instruction.
I think that integrating these informal assessments into your lesson shows that you are deeply concerned with student understanding and that you are capable of providing targeted interventions as needed. What admin would not want to see that?
Teacher Observation Tip #4: Know Your Admin & Their Expectations
I find observations to ultimately be pretty ineffective ways of measuring teacher performance, effectiveness, and growth over time (not to mention the fact that they are poor indicators of student learning). Even if an administrator were to stay for the full 82-minute block, it would be but a snapshot of my teaching expertise. Operating under the assumption that these observations are more about checking a box than they are about accurately evaluating my performance and worth as an educator, I know that I need to hit certain criteria that my observer will be looking for, just like how many students end up figuring out what their teachers’ expectations are for assessments and prepare/study accordingly.
Ask trusted colleagues what their experience has been with X, Y, or Z administrator. What are they looking for in particular? What elements are they particularly attuned to during an observation?
If you know that your World Language supervisor is paying careful attention to the amount of target language you use—rather than the quality or comprehensibility of the input you are delivering—then unfortunately you kind of need to cater to that expectation. If you know your principal is all about engaging lessons that capitalize on the most recent educational technologies, you should make sure that you intentionally incorporate technology into your lesson.
If you are new or the administrator is new to your building or district, feel free to discuss expectations during your pre-conference. If, for example, you know that your new vice principal is going to stop by later in the year for an informal observation, see if you could schedule a brief meeting with them sometime prior to the observation period to discuss which particular elements they value most during an observation.
Teacher Observation Tip #5: Collect Data for your Post-Conference
Think about some data that you can collect toward the end of your lesson. Perhaps you could have students fill out an Exit Ticket to show understanding, or pass out an index card in which you ask them to fill out three things they learned during class on the front and two adjectives to describe how they felt about the lesson on the back.
Bring this data to your post-observation conference as evidence of student learning. From my experience, administrators find this to be an impressive tactic because it shows that you have actual data to support your claims of efficacy. Administrators always ask, “How did you feel about the lesson?” Express how you felt while using the data you collected to substantiate your assertions.
Teacher Observation Tip #6: Reflect on your Lesson Prior to your Post-Observation Conference
Administrators appreciate and value self-reflective teachers. Effective teachers are not only able to demonstrate mastery of content area and sound pedagogy, but they are also able to critically and reflectively evaluate how their lesson went and what they can do next time to improve. I have never had a post-observation conference in which an administrator did not ask me to reflect on the lesson.
Knowing that this will be a question they ask you—and let’s be honest, even if they don’t ask you, you really should volunteer this self-reflective feedback during your post-observation conference to show that you are a thoughtful practitioner—it is important to think about how you will respond to this inquiry. Here are some self-reflection questions that I like to think about before heading into my post-observation conference:
How smoothly did instruction flow? How were my transitions? Did lesson activities flow seamlessly?
What were my strengths during the lesson? What am I particularly proud of?
How do I feel about student performance during my lesson? What factors positively impacted student learning, and what could I do to either maintain or improve student learning outcomes in the near future?
What area(s) may have been lacking during the lesson? How could I have approached it differently? What am I taking away with me moving forward in my teaching practice?
How would I teach this exact same lesson differently next year? Would I change anything? If so, what would I change specifically?
Teacher Observation Tip #7: Evaluate and Improve Mental Hygiene
Let me say this for anyone and everyone who needs to hear it: You are worth SO MUCH MORE than whatever numbers your administrators give you on your teaching observation. What you do day in and day out in the classroom cannot be encapsulated in a 20, 40, or even 60-minute observation. It cannot be reduced to a single-digit number, and it cannot be summarized by a multi-paragraph narrative of what you did in a single class period. Showing up for your students every single day, opening their minds to new languages and new cultures, sharing your cultural experiences with them, helping them to grow and improve as students, language learners, and human beings day in and day out… all of this is invaluable, immeasurable, even.
If needed, please begin doing the internal work to decouple your worth as an educator—and to a larger extent, your worth as a human being—from your performance on your evaluation. I wish I had the magic key to make this super easy for you, but I think it requires a lot of introspection, conversation with trusted colleagues, research in self-help and mental wellness, and sometimes intervention from trained mental health professionals. I have seen so many teachers question their efficacy, begin to doubt their capacities, and simply burn out (and sometimes leave the profession altogether) based on feedback that was provided to them in an evaluation. You and your students know your value… unfortunately, it’s impossible for admin to see that value during a single observation.
Try to walk away from your observations with one, two, or three practical pieces of feedback that will help you become a better educator. During your post-observation conference, determine if the feedback is constructive and actionable; discard any feedback that cannot be considered as such.
At the end of the day, teacher observations are an unavoidable part of our profession. They can be super overwhelming, especially if we are newer to the profession. I hope that this blog post has given you some practical ideas and strategies for improving your performance during your next teacher observation. Have you learned any tricks along the way to help improve performance and reduce anxiety during an observation? If you’re a new teacher, what elements of the process do you find to be most challenging or stress-inducing? I’d love it if you could share your experience with me in the comments below.
Happy teaching,
~ Michael
