We are thrilled to have Marla Muntner guest blog for us today. Marla has spent most of her professional life supporting teaching and learning—inside and outside of the classroom. She’s worked for newspapers, nonprofits, public schools, and education companies. As the former Marketing and Communications Manager for Teachstone, she thrived on creative work through designing instructional programs, managing complex projects, leading creative teams, and designing engaging communications materials.

Teaching is a human endeavor, and humans are social beings. That’s partly why teachers need feedback—just like the kids they teach—to help them know what they’re doing well and how to improve.

So it’s great to see increasing attention placed on providing observation feedback to teachers. The recent New Teacher Project (TNTP) report, Fixing Classroom Observations, offers relevant recommendations, and some counterarguments, to our work in this area.

There are a few key points where the TNTP recommendations fit within the CLASS™ system:

  • Observations should focus on observable performance—rather than continuing education or other factors that occur outside the classroom observation setting (p. 2).
  • Observers must be trained and normed in order to provide meaningful, useful observation feedback to teachers (p. 8).
  • “Classroom observations remain the most promising way to help teachers get regular, honest feedback on their teaching—the foundation of meaningful professional development” (p. 3).

We agree. And we recognize that providing CLASS observation feedback links the measure and improvement components of the CLASS system in meaningful ways. And as regular readers of this blog know, we’ll soon be providing a new 1-day feedback training.

The TNTP recommendations differ from our typical approach to observations in that they recommend focusing observations on areas of challenge for teachers. If a new teacher is struggling with classroom management, for example, they suggest focusing the observation and feedback only on that area (p. 6). We believe that it’s helpful to provide observational feedback on areas of strength as well as areas where there’s room for growth. Ginny Vitiello’s recent blog post does an excellent job of explaining why, and Hilary Ritt’s recent Teachstone webinar outlines practical suggestions and best practices for providing CLASS observation feedback.

Read the TNTP report, and post a comment here letting us know where you see overlap between their recommendations and your organization’s approach to teacher observation, evaluation, and feedback.