Transcript - AI Generated
Overcoming the fear of lesson observation
[0:19] Hi and welcome back. Today I am going to talk to you about how to improve your practice through lesson observation.
Now this is something that I think teachers is fine very daunting very intimidating to have other people in their classroom observing them and kind of making judgments about how good they are as a teacher but i'm going to try and give you a process here that's going to be helpful that focuses in on just your improvement and you seeing this as a way of developing yourself and improving your practice rather than other people judging you and going well you're a good teacher you're a bad teacher whatever we're looking at you know we can always improve teaching is a craft and when it comes to craft when it it comes to you know it's like a performance it's like creative arts it's like performing arts right when it comes to these kinds of things you can always improve it's a skill that you can always.
Deliberate practice: specific feedback for targeted improvement
[1:06] Work on and get better at and i want us to think about this in terms of you know we want to be good high quality effective teachers in our classroom having the impacts on our students that we want right large impacts and one of the best ways to improve what we're doing in a classroom is to have people who we think are really cool and really good at it come and help us so you've probably heard this phrase practice makes perfect and i'm going to say a big fat nope right not at all practice does not make perfect okay that's actually been shown through research you can practise something a million times and still be very bad at it okay the key thing with practice It's deliberate practice, right?
It's practice that focuses on a specific area to improve with specific feedback to help that.
So, you know, practise with a coach where you're going to work on your tennis serve, okay?
If you just go and practise your tennis serve 100 times, you're not actually going to become a fantastic server, okay?
[2:12] What you want is to go and practice your serve with someone there who is an expert server and who is an expert coach to sit there and give you feedback.
So you're going to serve and then you go, right, you need to change your foot stance. You need to toss the ball up high. You need to lean more forward, whatever it is.
And they're going to give you that specific feedback to give you the improvements that you're after.
And this is what we're going to do and apply into our teaching is we're going to say, all right, when I look at my teaching, here are a few things that I want to improve.
Steps to improve teaching: identify, observe, apply, and refine
[2:38] And so I'm going to pick one of those. I'm going to find someone who I think is really good at that.
I'm going to go and ask them, can you come and give me some feedback on how I go about doing this?
I'm going to have a lesson where I'm going to try it next week on Wednesday, period three, whatever.
Can you come and observe me as I do this and give me feedback to help me to improve it?
Okay, so we can always improve and we're just picking things that we want to constantly be improving.
So one thing we want to identify, right? So step one, identify one area.
So don't ask them to give you feedback on six different things, just one, one area that you would like to improve. and you can use the Australian Professional Teaching Standards type stuff or you might have the equivalent in your country or the Quality Teaching Framework.
[3:19] There's lots of research and evidence out there about what makes a great classroom teacher.
So just find some of those things and identify which one you want to work on first and get stuck into that. So identify the area.
Number two, have another teacher who you think does this really well come and observe you you okay and provide feedback with suggestions on what to do to improve so if you go back to like my i think i gave you three steps or something to effective and efficient feedback and so that was identifying one thing to improve and then getting giving the feedback of what to do to improve it so this person who's observing you they've got one thing they're focusing on and you want them to tell you what you need to do to improve that how do you go about so maybe it's a book you need to read maybe he's going to say oh come and watch me do it in my class and you'll see how i do it and you can then adapt that and then he can walk you through his process maybe he has a structure to how he does it so it could be feedback you can go well this is how i give feedback you did it this way but we can improve it by doing this and you can get more specific by doing this or yeah that will have their specific feedback and ways to actually achieve the improvements that that you're after.
The third thing is then follow the suggestions and get feedback again.
Okay, so you're like, right.
[4:35] That's the feedback I've got. I'm going to go and read this book and try and see how I apply that.
So read the book, come up with a lesson where you've applied it, ask them to come back and watch you again, do it again.
Okay. And then they might go, fantastic. You're getting really good at this.
I don't really have anything else to add.
[4:50] Or maybe that was good. Maybe try this now or that next.
And then you've got your next steps to continue to improve in that area.
[4:57] And you should probably also go and observe other teachers.
[5:00] Okay. So you have this teacher that you you want to observe who's observing you who you think is really good at it but maybe you want to go and get a bit more variety as well go and look at other teachers classrooms go just send out an email go hey i'm looking to improve in this area of my teaching has anyone got a lesson coming up where they're going to be doing something that relates to this that i can come and watch and see how you're going and they can send you oh yeah i'm going to be doing this in this period in this period in that period then you can organize to go and watch those teachers to implement it so that you can continue to refine and improve in that area and so there's essentially that kind of four steps identify the one area first identify the one teacher who's your main teacher is going to observe you and give you feedback and then you want to follow the suggestions given to you and make sure you also are looking at other teachers and observing them now when i was teaching i found this to be massively helpful improved my teaching hugely to have other people come in and observe me and give me feedback and specific feedback around key things that i wanted wanted to improve the key is really to focus on one thing at a time you might be able to focus on something else that's slightly you know connected to what you do the.
[6:07] Main thing but you want to keep the main thing the main thing when you're getting the feedback this is what i want to improve give me feedback on that it's not you know come and tell me if i'm a good teacher it's i want to improve in this area tell me how i can improve in that area by coming and watching me and telling me what i need to do to to get better right so focusing on one thing at a time improve that and then go on to the next thing okay and you want to be systematic about this.
[6:32] So working through different areas of classroom teaching.
So this is where those kind of quality teaching frameworks or the Australian National Teaching Standard type documents come in handy for you to go through and have like a checker box type list that you want to be working through.
And so that can be things like, you know, setting up a culture that focuses on learning, checking for understanding of your students' learning, differentiating the lesson so that you're actually adapting it to different students' interests, interest adapting it to where they're at in their levels of knowledge and understanding already and that kind of stuff maybe it's managing behaviour that you want to focus on or developing your rapport with your students and so you can come up with this list and just go okay these are the ones i want to improve we're starting on this one because i think it's going to be the most impactful and make the biggest difference in what i'm doing and then i'm going to go to this one and that one and so you just cycle through find different teachers who you think are experts in these particular areas and get their feedback and it will constantly improve you as a teacher teacher to make you a really effective and impactful teacher in your classroom.
[7:35] Well, I hope that was helpful. I hope that was encouraging and showed you a way to actually have other teachers into your classroom. Don't see it as judgement.
See it as a chance to improve, which we all need to do all the time.
Be constantly improving.
In fact, there's a saying that if you stop improving, you're going backwards.
[7:53] It's a phrase that's used a lot, particularly in business, the minute that you stop trying to get better, you start going backwards because other people just saw past you, right?
And so if you stop trying to get better as a teacher and you think, oh, I'm good, I'm comfortable, okay, that's when actually you're going to stagnate because things are going to change around you, right?
The Impact of AI on Education
[8:14] They're going to release AI, okay? For some people at some point when they were teaching, someone released Google, right?
Imagine that, where you were working, constantly teaching from textbooks or books in the library and going to the library and suddenly there's the internet and then suddenly there's google so you can find things on the internet and you know imagine how that impact all people are just going to google things and copy and paste it and that's going to be a problem for us with our assignments let's make them all handwrite it okay and now here we are ai's out they're going to write their assignments for them they're going to copy and paste it we're going to make them handwrite it right but all these changes have come and if we're not constantly improving what we're doing then we are going to start to go backwards because you know society moves on around us so let's continue to improve let's continue to get feedback let's make you know open classrooms is a fantastic policy for when you're looking to improve go and check out what other people are doing in their lessons let's constantly increase our impact and become effective teachers if you got stuff out of this make sure you subscribe come to teacherspd.net top right hand corner hit the subscribe button give me your email address i'll send you emails and just let you know when new videos are out and i'll give you other tips and tricks and well not not tips and tricks, but strategies and tactics.