In addition to these general recommendations, Bambrick-Santoyo identifies four guidelines for principals to follow when observing classrooms and providing feedback:
Observations need to be scheduled in advance to ensure they occur on a frequent and regular basis; these observations can be as brief as fifteen minutes.
Principals need to identify one or two key action steps for the teacher to improve upon. These steps should be measurable, observable, implementable within a short timeframe, and connected to the teacher’s larger professional development goals.
After the observation, principals need to give face-to-face feedback that involves practicing one of the key action steps identified for improvement (see here for more on the importance of practice).
Throughout this process, principals must have a system in place to ensure their feedback translates into practice. This involves tracking which teachers were observed, logging the feedback and goals agreed upon in the follow-up meeting, and assessing the teachers’ progress toward these goals.
Using these guidelines, principals can help teachers master
bite-size instructional techniques – ideally, these should be small adjustments the teacher can implement within a week. For instance, principals may recommend using
exit tickets—short questions to assess student understanding—to guide teachers who do not ask specific questions or pose questions that students respond to in synchrony. These provide instant feedback on whether students understood the lesson and an essential data point to guide the next lesson. Principals can also train teachers to
cold call students, which helps ensure all students—and not just some—are accountable for learning. In another case, for a teacher struggling with transitions and disruptions, the principal may demonstrate how to utilize routines and recommend
circulating the classroom throughout the lesson to maximize instructional time and mitigate distractions and misbehaviors. Finally, in classrooms where students struggle to comprehend a complex idea, principals can coach teachers to
break down the task into smaller parts or
name the steps in a process. As for any of these techniques, principals can adjust and adapt their recommendations to best fit the style and needs of the teacher.
What Principals do in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
For example, a nationally representative survey, conducted in Afghanistan in 2017, revealed half of principals neither observed nor provided targeted feedback to teachers (SABER Service Delivery Afghanistan report, forthcoming). It was also found, among those principals who did observe teachers, less than 5 percent had the proper training to do so.
Experimental research shows this is particularly problematic because principals who are not trained in classroom observations are unable to identify effective teaching—and as a result, they may provide counterproductive feedback. In the study, principals were shown videos of “effective” and “ineffective” teachers, as measured by value-added, and were asked to identify the effective ones. The principals correctly identified the teachers just 50 percent of the time—essentially the same as
relying on pure chance.
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