Excitement ripples through the staff room. There are big smiles and attentive stares. Usually, the Monday afternoon staff meeting is a tough crowd. But not today. For once, it seems that I won’t need to worry about securing buy-in for the new initiative I have just announced: we’re getting rid of formal lesson observations. And the whole team already seems to be on board.

Why would we do such a thing? Surely, observations are an essential part of facilitating professional development and keeping track of learning and teaching? Not necessarily. Our senior leadership team (SLT) recently took a long, hard look at what we were doing in these areas and decided that we weren’t doing a particularly good job at it.

Our termly lesson observations - based around offering three positive points and three next steps - felt tired. The procedure was stressful and added to teachers’ already demanding workload, but there was little evidence that staff or pupils were benefiting from it.

Teachers would overplan their lessons, stay later the night before and come in earlier than usual in the morning. The information gleaned from these snapshots into classroom practice was, at best, limited and, at worst, completely misleading - obscuring problems that needed fixing or suggesting issues that weren’t there. We wouldn’t judge children based on their outcomes from one lesson in the middle of term and give them overarching feedback based solely on this. Why then, should we judge teachers in this way?

We subscribe to Dylan William’s proposition that “every teacher needs to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better”. We also know that the vast majority of teachers are extremely reflective, constantly wanting to improve their practice and, as a result, improve outcomes for their children. Our job, as leaders, is to provide the best conditions for this to happen.

So, we decided to start from scratch, removing what we felt were outdated practices and replacing them with a structure that would help our teachers to develop and grow in a meaningful and proactive way. This began with a shift away from the paranoia-inducing language of “monitoring”, “observing” and “managing”, and replacing this with ideas of “supporting”, “collaborating” and “coaching”.

So, what does the new format involve, besides a change in language?

Teacher-led development

To make sure that teachers still receive feedback and guidance about teaching practice, free from the structure of observations, we have developed a system based on professional dialogue. Each teacher is assigned a member of the senior leadership team with whom to have an ongoing series of discussions, across the academic year.

Members of SLT visit classrooms every few weeks for a few minutes to focus on a target area of practice that teachers have identified. These short visits are followed up by specific feedback and discussion. Nothing is graded, and written notes are completely optional on the part of the teacher. To give a flavour of what this looks like in practice, this year, I have worked with a Year 4 teacher returning from maternity leave who wanted some feedback on her use of questioning, as she was worried she had become rusty. I have also worked with teachers on shared-writing strategies, oracy techniques and differentiation.

In contrast to stressful termly observations, these are teacher-led, low-stakes, professional discussions. We get to see normal classrooms rather than showcases, and can therefore have conversations about learning and teaching that are authentic and useful.

The butterfly approach

As in all primary schools, we have teachers who are experts in a range of areas. Some excel at the pedagogy of maths; some have exceptional subject knowledge in science; others have enviable behaviour management technique. If teachers are restricted to only using these skills with the 30 children in their own class, we are under-utilising our most valuable resource.

As such, we developed what we call the “butterfly approach”, whereby teachers visit one another’s classrooms with a particular focus. Two or three times a term, teachers “flutter” between rooms to work on a specific skill, model a technique, or to team-teach with a colleague. This does not require written feedback forms or targets - it’s about professionals sharing their skills to help one another develop and grow.

Teachers organise this themselves and SLT stays completely out of the process. Indeed, our only role is to cover in classrooms as required.

As this approach is so personalised, there is an immediate impact on practice. Teachers bring new techniques and approaches straight back to try with their children.

Furthermore, it has been an effective way to develop the capacity of our middle leaders, who tend to have a larger role to play in the dissemination of expertise. It has also cultivated bonds between staff more broadly.

Choice and flexibility

This year, the only members of staff who must endure full lesson observations are our student teachers, as these are a requirement of their teacher training provider. Everyone else, from newly qualified teachers to more experienced ones, is involved in an ongoing process with leaders and colleagues to help develop their teaching practice.

We now have a really open learning culture, built on trust. It is so normal for leaders and colleagues to wander in and out of classrooms that teachers and children barely bat an eyelid, safe in the knowledge that they are not being monitored or scrutinised, but supported towards a common aim.

Does the system work? I can confidently say that the SLT now have a far better picture of learning and teaching in our school, and of areas where additional support may be required. We can also point to countless examples where we have seen development in the pedagogy of our staff, without the pressure of formal observations.

It is genuinely exciting to witness how specific skills and expertise spread throughout the school as a result of this collaborative approach.

As for what the teachers think of the programme, we made it clear from the start that the choice of full termly lesson observations remained available for anyone who found the new structure inadequate. So far, there haven’t been any takers.

Nicky Pear is assistant headteacher at Cubitt Town Junior School

This article originally appeared in the 26 June 2020 issue under the headline “How butterflies emerged from class observations”