Effective Teacher Supervision, Coaching, and Evaluation

by Kim Marshall

The biggest challenge for principals is how they spend their time. What school leaders do minute by minute, day by day, week by week, and month by month has a direct impact on the most important goal: more good teaching in more classrooms more of the time (Saphier, DuFour, and Mattos, 2016). Beyond the basics of safety, discipline, systems, materials, supplies, technology, and the copying machine, here are five facets of instructional leadership that are the keys to successful teaching and learning:

Orchestrating professional working conditions, especially grade-level and subject-area teacher collaboration;
Ensuring that teachers get appreciation, instructional coaching, and a clear sense of their employment status;
Hiring effective teachers who are a good fit for the school;
Counseling out or dismissing persistently ineffective teachers;
Enlisting families as partners in the education of their children;

So where do teacher evaluations fit in? They fulfill the basic purpose of letting teachers know their employment status, but do they do more than that?

The process used by most schools consists of a pre-observation conference, full-lesson observation with detailed note-taking, writing up the evidence, and a post-observation conference. In my work coaching principals and consulting with schools, the overwhelming consensus is that this time-honored process is not an effective way to coach teachers or give them the kind of appreciation they crave. Why? Because formal evaluations are infrequent, often involve “glamorized” lessons that everyone knows are unrepresentative of daily reality, and, if the feedback is thorough, give teachers more information than most of them can handle. In other words, school-based leaders are saddled with a process whose basic design flaws prevent it from improving teaching and learning.

Why would schools continue to use a process that adds so little value? There’s a lot of inertia and cynicism about teacher evaluation, with people going through the motions with a compliance mentality. The results are not benign. The hundreds of hours spent on an ineffective process are not being spent on the far more productive activities listed above. And if teachers are required to submit “evidence” of various desirable activities, that robs hundreds more hours from productive work. The bottom line: using the traditional teacher-evaluation process actually harms students.

That’s a bold statement. Here’s the logic behind it. Most teachers are doing good work on a day-to-day basis, and all their students benefit. But every school has pockets of mediocre and ineffective teaching practices. In my presentations around the country, I ask teachers and administrators how much mediocre teaching there is in their school, and the responses (gathered with anonymous audience response devices) are always a mixture of “quite a bit” and “here and there.” When I ask, Is this okay?, educators say No.

As the discussion proceeds, they acknowledge that the traditional teacher evaluations almost never address those mediocre practices. And here’s where the harm comes in: the impact of sub-par teaching is felt disproportionately by students who walk into school with any kind or disadvantage: a dysfunctional home environment, a learning disability, language challenges, post-traumatic stress from abuse in their past, and weak preparation from previous grades. More-fortunate students can survive these practices; the least of these among us cannot.

What is to be done? The good news is that some schools are using a much more effective process: short, frequent, unannounced classroom visits followed promptly by face-to-face coaching conversations focused on one “leverage point,” then a brief narrative summary of the conversation sent electronically to the teacher. By making about ten of these 10-15-minute visits a year (which comes down to about two a day), administrators really know what’s going on in classrooms, know students far better, build trusting relationships with educators, appreciate the good work they’re doing, and bring about gradual but significant improvements in instruction. With so many classroom visits and follow-up conversations (as well as other points of contact), it’s easy to work with teachers to fill out detailed teacher-evaluation rubrics at the end of the year, summing up performance in all domains.

Do school leaders have the chops for this radically different approach? My experience is that the answer is Yes for most principals, assistant principals, and department heads, and that’s because of the design features of the process:

Being in classrooms a lot is energizing for leaders, especially when they see effective teaching practices and engaged students. They want to get out of their offices.
Seeing mediocre or ineffective practices is energizing in another way: improvement is a moral imperative, usually by coaching (not necessarily by the administrator).
Administrators have multiple “at bats”, each an opportunity to build their skills.
Addressing one leverage point at a time makes criticizing teaching (when it’s necessary) less difficult.
Teachers are less defensive in face-to-face debriefs, especially if they take place in their classrooms when students aren’t there.
In follow-up conversations, supervisors learn a lot about teaching techniques, students, and curriculum, and teachers have an opportunity to correct supervisors’ misperceptions and misconceptions.
The skills involved in brief observations and debriefs are eminently coachable to superintendents and their designees, especially if they conduct co-observations with school leaders.

In short, short observations are a continuous improvement process that bring out the best in administrators, helping them grow as leaders.

This approach to teacher supervision, coaching, and evaluation dovetails powerfully with the other factors listed above. When administrators have frequent, substantive communication about what’s happening in classrooms, they are much more effective orchestrating teacher team collaboration, getting the right curriculum materials, organizing professional development and other forms of support for teachers, finding the best ways to express authentic appreciation for effective practices, enlisting parents in the education of their children, hiring teachers who are a good fit, and, when necessary, counseling out or dismissing persistently ineffective teachers. Those actions are the heart of instructional leadership, and they benefit all students – but most especially students with the greatest needs.

Kim Marshall, formerly a Boston teacher and administrator, coaches principals, consults and speaks on school leadership and evaluation, and publishes the weekly Marshall Memo www.marshallmemo.com.

Kim Marshall will be in the Wisconsin Dells on Wednesday, October 9, 2019 at the Kalahari Resort for a session called Mini-Observations: Operational Details on Coaching Teachers with Short, Frequent, Unannounced Visits. Attend as part of the 2019 Elementary Principals Convention or as a stand alone session.