By Matt Renwick
When principals observe instruction, are we just focusing on what we see, or also paying attention to how we see it?
In educational leadership circles, there’s little disagreement about the value of observing classroom instruction and engaging teachers in instructional-focused discussions. These are high-impact strategies that can improve school outcomes. The evidence is overwhelming: effective principals who work with teachers to implement proven instructional practices significantly affect student learning (Grissom, Egalite, & Lindsay, 2021).
What is less clear is how these observations and interactions should look and feel.
The Learning Stance
I’ve come to believe the answer lies in a shift of perspective – one I wish I’d understood earlier in my principalship.
Halverson and Kelley (2017) describe this shift clearly:
“If leaders can take the stance as a learner in the classroom, they can observe how the lesson unfolds to students. This stance requires leaders to refrain from judgment about the quality of the lesson in order to notice questions raised by teacher and student interactions. Leadership content knowledge involves taking a stance as a learner and sharing observations about how the lesson is communicated from the perspective of the student.” (p. 75)
Rereading this passage recently, two phrases stuck out to me.
Refraining from Judgment
As a new principal, when I observed teaching through the lens of judgment, it was my attempt to control the situation. I wanted instruction to look a certain way, to get the outcomes I wanted to see. This desire for control was also a product of fear: I was worried that our students would fail if teaching didn’t improve to meet my expectations.
When I operated this way, I was communicating to teachers that I didn’t trust their current capacity or future potential. I couldn’t hear the questions raised by teacher and student interactions. This led to unproductive professional relationships.
Sharing Observations from the Student Perspective
As I gained experience and grew professionally, I learned to better support faculty by:
- Documenting what was observed in the classroom
- Communicating that information in an objective manner
- Asking what they noticed
When I described the experience from the perspective of the student, I encountered less resistance and more openness to the feedback.
Even with my greater objectivity, the faculty’s responses to my feedback were not always receptive. For example, I recall one teacher questioning the timing of my visits. “You always seem to come in when I am lecturing.” I wanted to react by suggesting that maybe it wasn’t my timing, and that lecturing might be happening too frequently in their classroom. Thankfully, I bit my tongue and agreed to change up the times in which I stopped in to visit, learn, and share my notes.
Watching for Mindsets Leads to Mindshifts
What I learned is that – just as my written observations of teaching and learning produce data to study and inform future decisions, so could teachers’ responses to my observations. Their responses to my collected data communicated the mindset they were in during the teaching/learning process. This feedback would help me better understand their intentions and meet them where they were in the moment.
In the example above, the teacher was defensive. They likely thought the notes I was taking were biased. I realized their resistance was information I could use – a signal that my approach, not their teaching, needed to change. Instead of disputing their position, I agreed to collect better data. I increased the randomness of my classroom visits while being consistently nonjudgmental and open to conversation. My purpose expanded to include achieving both my goals and theirs.
This shift required practical changes in how I structured my work. About 90% of my classroom observations became non-evaluative – more like a coach than an evaluator. But the structural change alone wasn’t enough. I had to be aware of and reflect critically on what role I was adopting in each observation. Was I slipping back into judgment mode? Was I genuinely curious about what students were experiencing or just focused on what I wanted to see the teacher doing?
Just as importantly, I learned to communicate my intentions to faculty. Teachers need to know why you’re in the room and how you’ll use what you observe. Without that transparency, even the most well-intentioned learning stance can feel like surveillance.
The Payoff
Research supports this approach. Seventy percent of classroom educators reported that formative feedback provided by observers and evaluators was helpful for improving their practice (Halverson & Kelley, 2017, p. 74).
More importantly, I’ve seen it work. Closing the loop on my example, the teacher finally acknowledged that they might be talking too much at the kids and not engaging them in more student-led interactions. “What ideas do you have?” the teacher asked me.
Not wanting to jump right into solutions, as if they had a problem that needed to be fixed, I first acknowledged their openness to ideas. Once they were recognized, I shared a pair of approaches that I had observed in other classrooms in the school. “Does either one intrigue you?” The teacher asked to learn more about literature circles.
Leaders Observing as Learners
Improvement becomes more likely when leaders let go of their desire for control and stop delivering verdicts. I gave this teacher back their power by creating a nonjudgmental space for conversation and trusting them to make decisions as a professional.
The question isn’t whether we should observe instruction. It’s whether we can observe it with curiosity rather than judgment – as learners alongside our teachers rather than as evaluators standing apart from them.
References
Grissom, J. A., Egalite, A. J., & Lindsay, C. A. (2021). How Principals Affect Students and Schools: A Systematic Synthesis of Two Decades of Research. Wallace Foundation. Also see Why Measuring Principal Impact Is Harder Than You Think.
Halverson, R., & Kelley, C. (2017). Mapping Leadership: The Tasks That Matter for Improving Teaching and Learning in Schools. Jossey-Bass.
Matt Renwick is a systems coach for CESA #3, a state-supported education service agency in Southwestern Wisconsin. During his 20+ years in education, he has served as a principal in two Wisconsin elementary schools and as a middle school vice principal, teacher and athletic coach.
Matt is the author of Digital Portfolios in the Classroom: Showcasing and Assessing Student Work (ASCD, 2017) and Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H.: Five Strategies for Supporting Teaching and Learning (Corwin, 2022). Subscribe to his substack and follow him on Bluesky. Read all his MiddleWeb articles here.
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