Focusing Short Classroom Visits on What Students Are Learning

(Originally titled “A New View of Walk-Throughs”)

In this important Educational Leadership article, Connie Moss (Duquesne University) and Susan Brookhart (a Montana-based consultant) have a number of criticisms of the way “walk-throughs” (short, frequent classroom visits) are used by many principals:

• They foster the myth that principals know exactly what to look for, are trained to assess teaching, and can infer what teachers need to do next.
• Walk-throughs are guided by one-size-fits-all checklists of best practices, which, say Moss and Brookhart, “tie principals to a protocol that gathers one-sided evidence, invites misconceptions about effective teaching and meaningful learning, and derails opportunities for collaborative learning.”
• Walk-throughs can result in superficial or erroneous recommendations – for example, telling a teacher to increase time on task but not noticing a weak instructional task. “It is not the amount of time students spend on a task,” say Moss and Brookhart; “it is the quality of the task that determines the quality of student learning.” 
• Walk-throughs don’t emphasize that principals as well as teachers can learn from classroom visits. 
• The walk-through process involves a top-down flow of information from the principal to the teacher to the student, but doesn’t look at whether students are actually learning. “Such ‘trickle-down decision-making’ ignores the role of the most important decision maker in the school – the student,” say the authors.

What’s the alternative? Moss and Brookhart advocate “formative walk-throughs” in which principals look at the lesson from the students’ point of view and focus on what’s being learned. During classroom visits, they say, principals should ask a few students, “What are you trying to learn today and how will you know when you’ve learned it?” Principals are looking for whether the lesson contains these key elements, as seen by each student:

• A learning target – What is important for me to do in today’s lesson?
• A lesson-sized chunk of content knowledge and skill – What must I learn in order to be able to do it?
• Assessments – How will I be asked to show that I can do it?
• Success criteria – How well will I have to do it?

“By using formative walk-throughs, principals develop conceptual understandings that give them new eyes, a new voice, and new confidence,” say Moss and Brookhart. “As principals look for and learn from what students do, say, make, or write during a lesson, they develop a keener eye for what learning looks like and an ever-growing understanding of how effective teaching supports the learning process.” They quote a Pennsylvania principal on his five 5-10-minute classroom visits each day: “Watching a lesson from the students’ perspective, and encouraging teachers to do the same, brings enormous clarity. It helps me to dialogue with teachers about what works for students, plan for ways to increase students’ learning, and gather evidence together about the effectiveness of our actions by examining what students do to demonstrate their learning in daily lessons.” 

“A New View of Walk-Throughs” by Connie Moss and Susan Brookhart in Educational Leadership, April 2013 (Vol. 7, #70, p. 42-45), www.ascd.org; the authors can be reached at moss@castl.duq.edu and susanbrookhart@bresnan.net. 

From the Marshall Memo #480