Teacherless Observations

Agile Concepts

  • Self-regulation
  • Student agency

Peak Learning Practices

  • Trust
  • Value

Learning & Teaching

In the first years of our small, combined grades 7 and 8 middle school, we were quite intentional about giving students as many chances to practice self-regulation as we could. Sometimes we were implementing a plan and sometimes we stumbled into new practices quite by accident. One of these was teacherless observations.

One morning, my colleague DeLona Allers was away from school and I was subbing her class. Before we started I asked the students about the Kanban board at the back of the room. This particular board had the basic categories of To Do, Doing, and Done. There were several flat magnets on which were written the classroom tasks that tended to repeat each week. In fact, they were some of the same ones I had on the agenda from DeLona, in addition to the day’s lesson.

On a whim I told the students that I would simply project the substitute plan for the day on the wall and that they should run their usual class, just without Ms. Allers. I decided to take running notes, minute by minute, of what I saw.

You’ve guessed the ending already: the students ran the class, some showing even a little pride that they knew what each next step was. A few students veered of course or had stretches of inattention. Nothing new there. Sometimes their peers helped them get back on track. That seemed promising. At the end of the lesson I shared the notes via Google Classroom with DeLona and thanked the students. The teacherless observation was born.

Later in the year Nic and I wrote up another teacherless observation. This time it was about one of Nic’s middle school Physical Education classes. I observed for nearly 90 minutes as students set up the gym, warmed up, taught a lesson, practiced, rearranged themselves into teams, and ran a badminton tournament. And they cleaned up at the end before heading to the locker rooms. At that point I shared my running notes and packed my bag. On the way out of the gymnasium I ran into Nic, who was coming in for her next class. “How was my observation?” she asked. “Great!” I replied.

How do teacherless observations fit the agile mindset? We think first and foremost that agile without trust is hardly agile. There isn’t much self-regulation if you can’t trust your students (and to extrapolate, our staff, your colleagues, your spouse, your children). Trust has got to be one of the cornerstones of an agile mindset. And in this case, the teacher has to trust the students to run the lesson, and the observer to simply observe - and the observer has to trust that the lesson will work (lest the observer becomes an unprepared substitute teacher)!

The other piece of agility here is of course student agency. You have to let them practice it if you claim you are teaching it.

You can read more about this particular lesson and the benefits of teacherless observations in a chapter that Nic and two of our colleagues co-authored, Getting Agile at School.

Source

From the LAS middle school, Leysin, Switzerland, 2017-2018 Questions: Paul Magnuson, [email protected], Twitter: @zebmagnuson

Further Resources

Magnuson, P. (2017). (Teacherless observations)[https://www.tieonline.com/view_article.cfm?ArticleID=2258]. The International Educator Online (12 December).

Magnuson, P., Tihen, B. Cosgrove, C, & Patton, D. (2019). (Getting Agile at School. In Agile and Lean Concepts for Teaching and Learning)[https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-13-2751-3_6]. Parsons, D. & MacCallum, K. (Eds.). Singapore: Springer.

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