Connecting Instructional Walks with Teacher Frameworks
For the last five years as an elementary school principal, I have explored the best approach to providing feedback and supervision for our faculty. I had initially created an instructional walkthrough form that allowed me to provide a narrative-based observation about instruction as well as being able to monitor where instruction was at with regard to the gradual release of responsibility. Click here for that post that describes this process.
I have discovered a better approach to staff supervision and feedback: Instructional Walks, highlighted in Regie Routman's book Read, Write, Lead: Breakthrough Strategies for Schoolwide Literacy Success. Actually, this approach has been sitting in front of me for four years now. Regie and her team promoted this more authentic practice for principals back in 2012 at her Literacy and Leadership Institute in Madison, WI.
Better late than never! I don't know why educators like me have to always "make it their own". Maybe just part of being a professional. I have discovered several advantages to taking a completely narrative-based approach to faculty supervision:
The visits are completely unannounced and can happen at any time. I don't have to ask permission. However, this system was developed with my teachers, with the understanding that I lead like a coach, offering praise and feedback and treating each visit as one small observation among many throughout the school year. Trust and relationships were developed before this process started.
The lens in which I view instruction is connected directly to our school's goals. This year, we are focused on increasing literacy engagement. We developed tenets of engagement by doing an article study early in the year. These attributes become the key words in which I "tag" each walk within a teacher's digital portfolio via Evernote. They also receive a paper copy of my notes, which I write by hand.
For the first time as a principal, I have been able to experience instruction instead of monitoring and scoring it. I feel like I have a much better understanding of each teacher's instructional approach and how our students are progressing as learners. From what I can gather, teachers also appreciate this different approach. As one teacher told me in the lounge, "I get more out of your one page of observational notes than from our old evaluation system."
All affirming feedback for this process. However, the one challenge I have found in using instructional walks as the primary form for teacher supervision and evaluation is aligning my observations with the Danielson Framework for Teaching. Using software such as Teachscape allows the principal to tag each artifact by the appropriate component and score it based on the framework with ease. Instructional walks are, like good teaching, a complex activity. This makes the assessment part of teacher supervision complex as well.
To help our faculty categorize my observations and evidence from my instructional walks notes, I created a short screencast that describes how teachers can tag each artifact. I thought you might also find it helpful, especially if you are taking a more authentic and respectful approach to teacher supervision.
[wpvideo 4b9SZWiO]