Sit at the back of a classroom for forty minutes and you will see a hundred things. A student crawling under a table after a pencil. A question that got three hands, then a pause, then eleven. A child at the far table who has not written a word and is nodding along anyway. The teacher catches some of it while teaching. The observer can catch more, which is the whole reason to be in the room. Most of it never makes it into the conversation afterward, and what does is usually whatever was loudest.
You will miss most of the room
In 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris showed people a short video of two small teams passing basketballs, and asked them to count the passes made by one team. Partway through, someone walked straight through the middle of the game. In some versions it was a woman carrying an umbrella. In others it was a person in a gorilla suit. Across the study, 46 percent of viewers never saw them.[1]
That was a lab study, with people watching a video, and a classroom is a lot more than a ball being passed around. The part that carries over is simple. Attention is narrow, and whatever you are counting decides what you notice.
So a coach who walks in to "just see how it goes" is still counting something. Usually it is the teacher, who is talking and moving, or the student out of their seat. The student who quietly got the wrong idea is easier to miss, and may be the one the teacher needed seen.
Agree on what you are watching for
The fix takes five minutes and happens before the visit. Ask the teacher what they want watched.
"I want to know who is actually talking during partner talk." "I think my directions for the math stations are too long, and I can't tell from the front." "Tell me what the back table is doing while I'm with my small group." Each of those gives you something to count. Each one came from the teacher, which matters for the conversation afterward, because nobody has to wonder why you were looking at that.
It also gives you permission to let the rest go. If the focus is partner talk, the student under the table after a pencil is not your job today.
This is week one of a coaching cycle, where the goal gets named and made countable before anyone watches (What a Coaching Cycle Actually Looks Like). It is also the observer's half of a habit from The Feedback Teachers Actually Want: ask before you give.
Watch the students, and the task
In 2009, Elizabeth City, Richard Elmore, Sarah Fiarman and Lee Teitel published Instructional Rounds in Education, a guide to groups of educators visiting classrooms together. They anchor every visit in what they call the instructional core: the teacher, the students, and the content, and how the three work together. Observers in rounds are asked to look at "not just what students are being asked to do, but what they are actually doing."[2]
On a visit, it looks like this. The directions on the board say "Explain how you know." Walk the room and look at what students actually wrote. If most of the pages have a number and nothing else, then the task students are doing is computation, whatever the board says. That is useful for a teacher to hear, and it says nothing about who the teacher is. It is about the task.
Sit where you can see students' hands and pages, and talk to two or three students, quietly, while they work. "What are you working on?" and "How will you know if you got it right?" tell you more about the lesson than a page of notes from the back wall.
Write down what happened
The same rounds work asks observers to keep their notes "descriptive, not evaluative," and to trade vague or judgmental generalizations for precise language.[2:1] It sounds easy until you try it, because most of us were trained to write down a judgment and leave the evidence out.
Compare two lines from the same visit.
"Students were engaged during independent work."
"At 10:12, nine of the twelve students at the back tables had started writing. Three were still reading the directions. By 10:15, two of those three had asked a neighbor what to do."
The first line is a conclusion. A teacher can agree with it or not, and the conversation stops there. The second is something a teacher can work with, and it points to a fix (the directions) without anyone having to say the word.
Three kinds of note hold up: the time, a count, and the exact words someone said. If you catch yourself writing an adjective, look for the time, count, or quote underneath it and write that down instead. The difference between describing and judging is the whole point of Coaching vs. Evaluation, and it starts in the notebook, before anyone says a word.
Whatever you are counting decides what you notice. Pick it with the teacher before you walk in.
One visit is one data point
In 2013, Andrew Ho and Thomas Kane, working with the Measures of Effective Teaching project, studied how consistently school staff scored recorded lessons. They had 129 administrators and peer teachers score lessons from 67 teachers, more than 3,000 scores in all.[3]
A single lesson watched by a single observer turned out to be a weak read on a teacher. Somewhere between about a quarter and a little under half of what showed up in a score came from the teacher. The rest came from which lesson it was and who happened to be watching.
That was a study of scoring lessons for evaluation, which is a different job from coaching. The caution still applies to anyone who watches teaching for a living. One afternoon can be a hard day, a fire-drill day, or the day the copier broke. So ask the teacher one more question after the visit: "Was today typical?" Then look for the pattern across several visits before you build anything big on what you saw.
Visits are scarce in a small school where one coach sees everyone (Instructional Coaching for Small Schools), so a focus agreed in advance makes each one count for more. With no coach at all, What to Do When Your School Doesn't Have a Coach covers how teachers can do this for each other, and The First Weeks of School Set the Whole Year is a good time to start.
After the visit
Start with what you saw, read straight from your notes, and let the teacher react before you add anything. Then the teacher picks one small next step, and you both put a date on the calendar to talk about how it went.
If you are the teacher being visited, you can run the first step yourself. Tell whoever is coming in what you want them to watch.
Where eduimpact comes in
eduimpact does not sit in your classroom and it does not score lessons. A teacher brings what happened, in their own words or alongside a coach's notes, and eduimpact helps them think it through in plain language, drawing on the school's own documents when they are relevant.
In a school, the coach reviews what eduimpact says and grades its replies against the school's own model of good teaching. The replies get graded. The teacher never does. What the coach gets back is a short list of places worth looking, so the next visit starts with a focus already on the table.
Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28(9), 1059-1074. https://doi.org/10.1068/p281059 ↩︎
City, E. A., Elmore, R. F., Fiarman, S. E., & Teitel, L. (2009). Instructional Rounds in Education: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Quoted phrases from Teitel, L. (2009). Improving Teaching and Learning Through Instructional Rounds. Harvard Education Letter, 25(3). ↩︎ ↩︎
Ho, A. D., & Kane, T. J. (2013). The Reliability of Classroom Observations by School Personnel. MET Project, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. https://cepr.harvard.edu/resource/reliability-classroom-observations-school-personnel ↩︎