Learning Walks: Can You Really Judge Teaching?

Hello everyone, Ross here at Teacher Toolkit. I thought I'd try something different. I've invested in a Teacher Toolkit branded microphone here. Uh I'm sitting at the back of my garden. I've just finished four weeks of backto-back school and college teacher training all around the country, north and south, east and west. Uh next couple of weeks um in Northern Ireland, Liverpool and North Wales. So, and then I've literally reached uh every corner. Now, I want to talk about learning walks, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And like me, school leaders watching this, you'll have done hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of learning walks, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I guess a bad one that always sticks in my career is arranging one with an ECT, an early career teacher, and then forgetting to turn up. And I was mortified. That's the only time I ever did it in my whole career. And I never forgave myself. And looking back, I guess the ect could have got anything from me at that point because I was so apologetic and willing to do anything and everything to make her life a little bit easier and all those workload pressures and nerves that she must have had the days leading up to that me popping in. So let's define learning walks. First of all, I'm talking here not about your formal observations where you might have one or two people in your room, inspectors or performance management observations where they might last in excess 20 minutes up to 60 minutes. I'm talking less than 20 minutes, maybe five or 10 on average. And again, there are there is lots of kind of guidance out there particularly in unions about what constitutes learning walks. I've got some notes here I just want to go through and I don't know how long this video will be and if everyone will watch it, but I'd like to maybe start something new this academic year. Um, how people's attention spans are changing, how people consume content. I suspect people can watch this uh in their staff briefings, perhaps listen to the audio version of the video on their travels or dipping in and out of this as you as and when you want to rather than just always reading a blog post, which I guess is a bit old school these days. Anyway, I digress. Should school leaders, college leaders visit classrooms? Yes, of course they should. So, I guess the question is what's the purpose? So typically school leaders are popping in to manage behavior to give support. So we're not talking about that. We might pop in to look at student work. So I will definitely talk about that. But I'm here talking about learning walks, the purpose of them. So those kind of one to call it 15 minutes where we pop in where we want to see what's happening and we may or may not give some feedback. Post-it, post-it notes, postcards, a little email summary or a thumbs up and walk out the room. I guess as a bottom line, as a former school leader, popping into lots of different classrooms around the school is a good way to just check the mood of the staff and the students. And I've had lots of different approaches. So you might have a member of staff on duty with a radio walking around for emergencies, picking up students that are causing a bit of bother and you might support the member of staff, give a few pep talks along the way, or you might have to escort them to another classroom. So those kind of things are normal. Uh I've chosen a really bad windy day here as you can see. radios, walking around, checking the mood, on duty, escorting students to different classrooms, making sure people are in lessons, those kind of things. That is a really important process. Now, I wouldn't call those learning walks. I'd call those maybe duty points where school leaders are raiders walking around school, just supporting the general safety and day-to-day running of the school. That's important. So, I'm not talking about that. That's different from evaluating teaching and learning. Let's talk about some good benefits of learning walks and evaluating teaching and learning. So I guess the first point is if I'm always around the school, I am visible. I am a as and when needed extra bit of support for teachers around the school. I will be ensuring that policy strategic decisions are connected to everyday life seeing what's happening. I'm going to come to the point whether I can test and evaluate it reliably. That's another question. But just generally moving around the school, being visible, getting a sense of behavior, atmosphere, and support needed. That is super super important for all schools. And that that needs to be a clear purpose that all teachers understand. Now, of course, in some schools, in many teacher experiences, you'll often find that that doesn't happen at all. Where are the SLT? Where are the leadership team? Doors are closed, corridor changeovers at break time. No one's around to support. And it's, you know, who's the bravest, who's the strongest goes out to organize the students, settle things down, and, you know, where's the school leader? And I've definitely lived that in my teacher life and my school leader life where I'm thinking, where are my colleagues? Now, you can't be everywhere all the time as a school leader. And you do want a collective responsibility and a collective effort also which is you know you kind of uh meet and greet send end and send on corridors. Those kind of philosophies are really important for all of us to ensure the safety and kind of general operation of the school. Let's talk about the bad aspects of learning walks. You know I might do a short pop-in learning walk into your classroom. I might make that a judgment about your teaching and learning and I have no other context about [snorts] what's been happening before last week, last month if I'm literally just popping in randomly. And that happens a lot. So in my leadership life, easily 75 to 100 plus teachers and if you do intend to do a learning walk, you can get around the entire school if you're quick, but you're literally in 30 seconds in one place, couple of minutes in another. What can you reliably test in a 60inute lesson? Now you I've got lots of views about performance and attention. What I see kids look engaged. Well, that's a performance. You know, I can't necessarily see working memory attention. And I think as a profession, we're a bit more aware of these things. I would question whether our inspections and learning walks and observations take that into account. you know, um, seeing people's seeing pupils and students busy doesn't really tell us about what they're learning. Now, think about feedback. We've all received the good, the bad, and the ugly feedback. Uh, I've probably given it, fact, not probably. I've definitely given it in my career. Have no doubt. Um, so we all receive feedback or sometimes nothing at all or you might get something with little clarity about the visit. And I guess that bottom line is how is this improving my practice? And that's got to be the overarching question about all the things that we do learning walks if we are going to attach a judgment of some kind. Now provocation, a what went well even better if is a judgment. So although it might be offered as a light touch and a postcard or an email follow-up, a what went well even better riff or two stars on a wish, what call it once, that is a judgment. Now let's think about the ugly. Now I create I created all sorts of learning walk templates, observation templates, book look scrutiny templates you can imagine constantly refining them. Now in my view as a teaching learning leader that is my expertise. So, I need to be at the forefront of national practice, international thought, academic research. And I'd like to think that I was and there's always things for us all to learn, but you can have the best systems in place, the best paperwork in place, but if your immediate team aren't up to speed in their busy kind of day-to-day life with protocols, procedures, you can see how I I I mean this quite loosely here, one bad egg on the leadership team could put your whole systems and procedures at risk and that can lead to lots of kind of moments of catastrophe. It can lead to one or two upset teachers and all sorts of things, you know. So, I spent many years creating templates, performers judging, cording, capturing endless moments of inconsistency and never getting to a place where myself or head teacher or other leaders were happy with everything that we saw. I would argue that that's a lot to do with what's been evaluated. too much, too little, too broad, maybe not narrow enough, those kind of things. And then we think about evidence, collecting evidence. I've definitely chosen a very windy location here. So, you know, work scrutiny. Now, I've spent couple of years researching the latest things on feedback and stuff. You know, even looking at the education endowment foundation, which I don't think cuts it to be fair, and they do wonderful work over there, but you know, not many teachers are familiar with the phrase feed up or feed forward. And when we look at school policies, they make a reference to verbal feedback, written feedback, but they don't define the strategies. And often when we go off and do work scrutiny or book looks or I might do a learner walk and flick through some books, it's a weak evaluation method. And if I'm just looking in books, I'm ignoring the verbal and nonverbal assessments that are taking place. And here's a real challenge for the whole teaching profession. How do we evaluate those aspects of assessment? Do we want to? Should we? I believe we should. It's how we do it. I guess that's the real test. So collecting evidence of marking I guess it can become a substitute for checking the learning or checking the good quality teaching or we just want to check impact but we often fail in work scrutinies in particular to ask the single question has the student responded to the feedback now again if it's written it's maybe easier for an observer who's not in there day in day out to find that evidence but if I'm doing it in a learner walk at the back of room in five minutes without a conversation with the teacher but only with the child and relying on what they say. I guess it's another quite weak evaluation method. So again, maybe not for this video, another time, but leave some comments. What do you think? How could we improve work scrutiny? Should we look at books in short learning walks or not at all? And then I guess thinking about all those performers that we use as school leaders and there's lots of great online platforms collecting endless bits of data but all these bits of data, all these forms filled in still doesn't make our evaluations reliable. So again for another video in the future [snorts] I might start to unpick and go into specific details about how I'd recommend school leaders do this. So some questions I think that we miss as school leaders. Work scrutiny. How does your student or pupil act on the feedback? Because that has to be the core question to be tested or evaluated. When you think about all the academic research, it always tends to signpost. Students need to trust the assessment and they need and they need to see, hear, understand the assessment, not necessarily see, but hear it and be able to act alone. So, do they understand? Do they read it and see it in their books? And do they know how to act that matters most? And for me, knowing how to act that comes back to your metacognitive thinking that we try to equip our students to be able to use to be able to fix problems alone. I guess another key question to ask would be, do the students understand it and use it to improve? Now, how do you test that in a learning walk, in an observation, in a book scrutiny? You know, it's a lot of effort to do it reliably, not just with one child, but you imagine trying to do this for the whole class set. So I'd be really interested to know what people are currently doing with work scrutiny and how they do it well without it being a big burden to the teacher and how do they do it reliably in particular and I guess if we never check what work is trying to achieve then I guess we have to question what's the point of it because it is a source of many different outcomes of classroom success but it's just one source. Let me just finish with what we fail to capture in learning walks, work scrutiny, those kind of things. So I mentioned earlier verbal feedback. Now if I give my students verbal feedback, let's say Ross is achieving some brilliant work. He's got an exam next week, but I choose to delay his feedback because I don't want him to get a bit too cocky. I need him to put a bit more effort in over the weekend before his exam. I see him on Monday morning, exams on Tuesday or Wednesday, but I want to delay that feedback to make sure he puts in that final effort to secure the grade. That's a huge influence on learning, but observers won't see that. They may or may not ask me about my internal decisions, my professional judgment. Now, a big question I struggle with is how do we capture that evidence that a teacher makes? Would we want to capture it? If we did, how would we capture it? Because ultimately that verbal decision, Ross, I'm not going to give you feedback today. Do XY Z for homework. I'll see you on Monday, exam on Tuesday. How do I capture that decision? How do I capture that professional judgment again? Should we want to if we if we do, how do we do it well? because otherwise we ignore that rich assessment experience that teacher gives to students that we don't capture in a written work scrutiny. And again the same with you know non-verbal gestures, thumbs up, smiles, pausing, leaning, telling off those kind of things with my eyebrows. You know all those nonverbal gestures and cues they don't leave any trace any physical evidence. Well, I'd argue that with myself actually because they do because when we define outcomes, we can talk about attendance, reward points, punctuality to class, completing more work to a higher standard. There are they they are concrete sources of evidence that we could track back to if we know consciously we are pausing or thumbs up in class and those kind of things. Maybe these things we could see that make a difference. So, that's a tricky one. Other things we fail to capture, you know, teachers notice and respond and adjust to students all the time in class throughout the whole lesson. Now, unless I've agreed to look at these things with you in an observation when if I pop in a learning walk, I'm not necessarily conscious of what's in your head and the decisions that you're making at the front of the classroom. So, again, there are other things that we fail to capture in a learning walk. and and you know looking in books you know I sit at the back I don't want to disturb the class I'll flick through Ross because he's sitting next to me again that's quite a weak decision and an evaluation method to use in a learning walk those brief visits we know only reveal part of that process so I guess learning walks if you're popping in and looking in books how's that being communicated with the teacher what's your strategy rather than an ad hoc approach in class would be a few things I'd like to unpick just to finish And what would I change? Well, I think the first thing with learning walks is we need to be explicit about their purpose. An informal check-in, how long for, is it for support, general mood check-in, or is there an evaluation to good going to be made? And if there is a postcard, what went well, even better if, and whatever else there might be, that is an evaluation. And I think teachers need to be aware of that. I guess the other thing to think about is, you know, using visits to ask questions to students and of course to teachers. Now, I would argue if you're popping into my classroom, I want to know in advance what questions you're going to ask. Now, of course, when we get to high accountability stakes, then if I know that's going to be used against me, I'm going to of course make sure that my students put their hands up so it looks like a good performance. And I'm always going to ask Ross because I know he's going to give me the right answer in front of the headteer who's watching. And the same could be achieved when school leader pops in to ask questions to students or to look at books. I could quite comfortly say at the front of the classroom, "Hi, Mr. McIll, nice to see you. Go and talk to Ross over there." He can talk you through all his work today and tell you what he's been doing and straight away I direct the lesson. Now whether you've got a confident school leader or not or someone who has communicated with you in advance or not about their purpose for them popping in, we start to get into this kind of silly nature of playing the game, playing the system. And I'm always reminded of a I won't say his name and I don't know if you'll watch this, but a head of math that I used to line manage. I remember when we used to do our formal observations say I'll get I'll get that lesson out. He used to always get me an outstanding grade. Those kind of things. uh as we moved into the new landscape of not grading lessons, he knew in that framework it always worked. So, you know, rolling out the same old lesson plan for observations is, you know, that Hawthorne effect. I'll put a link in the video where you can read a bit more about how we perform when we know people are coming to watch. I guess the last question, you know, when we do ask questions, you know, the last question I've got for you, when we ask questions, what questions should we ask to our students? How how should would we communicate these to our teachers in advance? You know, when we are investig investigating these things, where do we draw conclusions from? Can we trust them? You know, I'm full of lots of thoughts. I'm not sure if this video will come across coherent, but it's my first go and I'm planning to do this once a week or so to keep you all uh interested and excited and get the conversation going. And I've got Bella here behind me. She might feature in some of the videos. Uh my last point then is you know when we check what people's do with their feedback the important reminder to us all is not just checking to see whether feedback exists but that real hard question for us all. What did the student do next that matters most? Anyway, before my video falls over. I'll make sure I don't record a video in the wind again. How do you how does your school currently do learning walks? What are the good successes? What are the not so good successes of your current processes? Let me know. Drop a comment in the video.