Watching colleagues teach is an effective way of improving your own classroom practice while also contributing to a culture of mutual support.
This was the rationale for our school recently running an “open classroom” fortnight, in which teachers could informally drop into lessons to get ideas about teaching and learning, and see what students are experiencing in other subjects.
We’d never tried this before. So, how did we do it? Well, first, it’s important to say that we aimed to keep the administrative burden low. We ran the fortnight over three weeks, with a one-week break in the middle.
How do ‘open classrooms’ work?
The process of organising visits was relatively informal. To make it easy for staff to identify lessons they would like to drop in on, we shared a digital copy of the whole-school timetable and also displayed a paper copy in the staffroom. Alongside this, we offered some prompts that might help staff to decide which lessons would be most interesting to see. For example:
- Watch a class you teach, or your form group, in other subjects.
- Watch a particular year group in different lessons.
- Choose a subject that is very different to your own, to see what teaching and learning looks like there.
There was no booking process; colleagues simply turned up to a lesson in a period when they were free, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. If there was someone else in the room already, we suggested returning later; each member of staff was asked to stay for a maximum of 15 minutes in any one lesson. We suggested that teachers visit as many or as few lessons as they wanted but that, ideally, they should visit at least two lessons during the fortnight.
The headmistress and her two deputies deliberately did not visit lessons in case it felt too much like staff were being scrutinised, although colleagues were encouraged to visit them in their lessons.
After a visit, teachers were asked to email the person they had visited, to thank them and give an example of something they’d enjoyed seeing. We insisted that this was not about giving feedback or suggesting areas to work on. I was, as assistant head for teaching and learning, copied into these emails and, at a subsequent department meeting, colleagues shared their learning, explaining who they visited and what their key takeaway was, in a minuted discussion.
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How did the fortnight go? Approximately 132 lessons were visited across the two weeks. Some colleagues were “serial visitors”, watching five or more lessons, while other teachers were resistant to visiting lessons. Some teachers never received a visit - and those members of staff reported feeling “disappointed” about this.
In terms of the feedback, the minuted discussions were nuanced and focused on teaching and learning. The thank-you emails mostly centred on the impact on teachers’ own practice and contained some very positive comments. There were a number of encouraging reactions to the feedback process itself, with staff reporting that they appreciated getting positive comments from other teachers.
Will we do this again? The short answer is yes.
We would definitely run the fortnight, with a week’s break in the middle again as some staff seemed to find the process of being visited quite stressful. The “three-week fortnight” arrangement allowed time to reflect, gave more opportunities to visit lessons and meant the process was not as intense as it would have been if we had run it as two weeks back to back.
However, there are some things we would change going forwards. To encourage all members of staff to take part in visits, we would ask heads of department to spend more time discussing the benefits of visiting lessons, maybe as part of annual reviews.
We are also looking at developing an “areas of expertise” list, so that staff can share their skills and knowledge across the school - and to make it easier for teachers to find colleagues who might be demonstrating a particular approach that they are interested to learn more about.
Ultimately, the more this becomes just part of what we do, the less stressful, and the more beneficial, staff will find it.
Andrew Boardman is assistant head, teaching and learning at Channing School in north London
