Observing for Equity

Lately, I've been 'on the hunt' for observation tools to share with my Coaching Practicum participants. Teachers often request for coaches to do informal observations to help them collect data about the goings-on in their classroom spaces. Within our program, we position coaching observations as:

• taking a descriptive tone to avoid judgment
• informing instructional decision-making to avoid evaluative stances
• focused on student evidence rather than teacher practice

Teacher practice comes into play as coaches partner with teachers to analyze student evidence and determine next instructional steps. This approach avoids a deficit perspective of 'fixing' teachers by beginning with student needs, interests, and strengths to drive the design and responsiveness of instructional planning. 
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This article, Two Heads Are Better Than One from Teaching Tolerance, shares strategies for coaches to partner with teachers as anti-bias allies. The toolkit provides resources to help coaches observe for equity. Some of these tools align well to our student-centered observations, while others take more of a management lens by focusing on what teachers say and do. While these may be less relevant to our purposes, they do offer opportunities for cycles where a teacher-centered goal has been selected. I also like to think about how the process of collecting evidence can be slightly shifted to also encompass student evidence that will help teachers to discern the impact of their instructional choices 'in the moment' as they elicit, interpret, and respond to student evidence. In fact, this is the mindset I take into my student teaching observations where teacher evidence is still necessary for guiding our reflections. In those cases, the observational notes must still be situated alongside student evidence in order to keep students at the center of our analysis and keep our discussions in context.