Educational Designer

Collecting the right information from classrooms, analyzing it and providing feedback are at the heart of evaluating and improving any system. In schools, classrooms are the systems that, together, determine the school's overall performance. Thus, principals and other leaders need to be deliberate and intentional when collecting, analyzing, and using information from classroom observations. They provide the best source of information about what is going on during lessons, but since a classroom is a complex group of interacting human beings, it is not easy to pick out what is most significant. This is particularly true for observers who do not have a deep background in mathematics. Observers may be impressed by a quiet class listening to a teacher explaining a concept, then working an example on the board, followed by the students working a bunch of very similar tasks. Is this good teaching? It may be excellent class management but with limited learning for many students.

When observing lessons to understand how the learning is going, the key focus needs to be on ‘What are the students doing’? Research shows that few listen to the explanation; they focus on the worked examples, knowing that their role is to imitate what the teacher did. This they mostly do well - though for many their scores in a test later show the learning was transitory. Learning has levels of understanding summarized as: imitation, retention, explanation, adaptation, and extension. Robust long-term understanding depends on them all; the first two are not enough. Classroom observation needs to focus on what the students are doing and how teacher practice affects this. Are students asked to explain their reasoning, not just give answers? Are students given opportunities to apply their mathematics in new ways in order to solve a problem, and to persist if it is not immediately clear what to do? Is every student involved in the core activity? These are key mathematical practices. Valid classroom observation needs to encompass them.