Seeing Teaching and Learning With New Eyes- Richard Jones, Executive Director

Most of us are visual learners. We gather information when watching video. We appreciate lectures with high-quality visuals and we brainstorm through graphic organizers.

However when we create professional development we often forget about our preference for visual learning. We require teachers to read books and articles and suffer through lectures and workshops. My often used statement about limited effectiveness of presentations is, “I have never seen a teacher change his or her teaching as a result of sitting through a workshop or reading a research report.” I am convinced that teachers only change instruction through emotionally connected experiences that cause them to reflect about their own teaching or the opportunity they have to watch someone else teach. We need to acknowledge the value that observation presents to continuous professional learning.

I was recently working with the high school engaged in an innovative activity that reminded me how important observation can be to professional learning. This high school is in the process of creating career academies and in preparation for that required an activity where each teacher was to observe two classes. A mechanism was provided for coverage of their existing classes with substitutes and teachers were allowed to choose which colleagues they wanted to observe. They were held accountable for the visits with a specific deadline and a reflection form in which they were asked to identify teaching practices that they found applicable to their own teaching. One requirement was that they were asked to observe at least one teacher in a completely separate instructional area. For example academic teachers were required to observe career and technical education teachers and vice versa.

The reflections on this activity revealed powerful professional learning among the staff. Teachers commented that they had never seen the students so engaged, or observed the creative work that students were able to do or observed the positive relationships among teachers and students and how hard students worked to please some teachers. These observation experiences gave teachers an opportunity to look at their own teaching and learning through new eyes. They saw students they knew, or at least they thought they knew, working very differently in their colleagues classrooms. They saw colleagues, who they thought they knew, at least socially, using highly effective teaching techniques. Teacher cited examples about how they would look at their own teaching differently.

I’m reminded of the old fable of the blind men observing an elephant and depending upon whether you felt the trunk, the tail, or the leg, your descriptions of the elephant were very different. When teachers look at teaching and learning in their own discipline and from their own experience which they are very familiar with, they are actually blinded because they are continuing to see teaching and learning as it has always existed. However, but by making observations of other teachers working with their students in a different content area, it gives them new lives to reflect on their own teaching and learning. This is a powerful professional learning opportunity, not generated by research or an outside expert, but with teachers working with one another in the school to see and reflect about teaching and learning through the power of observation.