After graduating from college, I spent a year as a teacher’s aide in an elementary school. My purpose was two-fold: to figure out if I wanted to change the direction of my career from psychology to education (the answer was yes), and to spend a year immersed in the day to day life of different classrooms so I could observe various teachers in action.

And observe I did, for hours each day. I remember drawing my own private conclusions about which teachers are “good” and which are “bad,” but if ever asked to explain my assessment, I’m not sure if I would have been able to. What exactly makes some teachers more effective than others? Is it their communication style? The curriculum they use? How well they know their students? And if a particular lesson is not successful, what should that teacher do differently the next time?

These seem like particularly straightforward questions which, at the very least, should be easily answered by school principals and administrators since they are often the ones charged with observing and evaluating teachers. But according to a recent article in Ed. Magazine (published by Harvard’s Graduate School of Education), educators actually lack a shared understanding when it comes to evaluating instruction, and have varying ideas of what effective teaching and learning look like. (A single lesson can be considered a resounding success to one classroom observer, and a complete failure to another, without either observer being able to explain exactly why.)

It’s therefore not surprising that feedback given to teachers following classroom observations is often vague and of little use, and they miss out on a potentially valuable opportunity to gain insight into their own teaching. If the only feedback teachers receive is in the form of their students’ test scores, how will they know exactly what they are doing well and what they should be doing differently? And without the ability to provide specific and useful feedback, how can principals become true instructional leaders who directly impact the quality of teaching and learning taking place in their schools?

To address this issue, several Harvard faculty members came up with a brilliant idea: What if instructional leaders could be taught to conduct rounds the way that doctors do in hospitals? They could jointly observe a lesson, and then talk about what they see using factual statements based on evidence (like: I notice that the teacher said this, and the student did that) as opposed to judgmental ones (like: the teacher didn’t communicate well). They could then use their shared observations to draw conclusions, and offer concrete and useful feedback to teachers along with strategies for an action plan.

And so a new model for conducting classroom observations called “instructional rounds” was born, and became the subject of a book called Instructional Rounds in Education: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning written by Elizabeth A. City, Richard F. Elmore, Sarah E. Fiarman, and Lee Teitel.  Instructional rounds are already being implemented in several states across the county (such as Connecticut and Massachusetts) as well as in Australia.

The instructional rounds model does not mirror the medical model in every aspect, and although having a skilled facilitator is always key, so is as a group-learning mentality in which the individuals involved are comfortable acknowledging that they don’t have all the answers, and everyone, regardless of rank, is willing to work on improving their own practice.  (As it says in the article, the “senior-doctor-knows-best” mantra does not apply.)

This story brings to mind two others which I wrote about in previous posts. The first is about the Gates Foundation which recently pledged to spend a whopping half a billion dollars over the next five years to figure out exactly what qualities make a teacher effective and how to measure those qualities in a classroom. (Maybe their findings can be used to enhance instructional rounds, or vice versa.)

The second is about a method of professional development originating in Japan called “lesson study”  in which a group of teachers collaborate on the design of a model lesson, observe each other delivering that lesson to students, and then collectively figure out how to improve upon it. As in instructional rounds, the focus is taken off of criticizing teachers and onto helping students learn. Both are collaborative forms of professional development intimately connected to specific teachers’ actual practice, and rather than being used for punitive purposes, are positive methods used in service of improving the quality of teaching and learning taking place in classrooms.

I think lesson study and instructional rounds have the potential, if implemented correctly, to really shake things up in schools that adopt them, and help both teachers and instructional leaders hone their skills and take their practice to the next level. I predict (and hope) that these methods will spread to more districts around the country in the near future.