These are five must read tips for your teaching observation to decrease your stress levels so that you can feel confident.
1. Be prepared as best as you can for your teaching observation, given the circumstances.
Administrators will sometimes batch observations during the school year. Observations need to be completed so that teachers have enough time to improve if they need to. So you will have some idea the month your administrator might come in, so your extra preparedness will help to reduce your anxiety.
Try to have all your materials and activities prepared for a week at a time and visualize in you head how you would like your lessons to play out. This will help because if something doesn’t go as planned, you’ll have an idea of how to handle it.
You may not know when your administrator is coming to your classroom but if you’re prepared this will make a world of difference.
2. Engagement is a critical piece in your teaching observation.
Your lesson may not be perfect but if your students are engaged, this will demonstrate your ability to have students actively participate during a lesson.
Engagement includes students talking about and sharing ideas about the lesson objectives. Working together in pairs or small groups completing a task relating to the objective and solving problems as the arise.
3. A clean and organized classroom makes a world of a difference.
As someone who has completed observations, I cannot tell how much of a difference having a clean and organized classroom makes.
The sense of calm when walking into a clean and organized classroom compared to a unorganized and messy classroom is marked.
I want you to think of this as the message you’re sending to your students. If your classroom is clean and organized you’re sending a message to your students and administrator that learning is important work.
4. Know the tool that is being used to observe you by your administrators.
A former supervisor of mine, made me aware of this and I am so grateful because it changed my practice.
I was able to see which areas in my teaching practice needed improvement and the criteria that I had to meet in order to be effective. It reminds of giving students a rubric so that they know what criteria they need to meet in order to gain a certain score on the rubric.
Get familiar with your observation tool because you will know exactly what areas you need to work on based on your own self-assessment after looking at the tool.
5. Ineffective practices will come to light even though you might try to hide them.
Some administrators are able to tell if you have been winging it or if you’re unprepared because its not easy to switch automatically what you’ve been doing all along.
Students will also let it be known that this is not how things have been going for the year. Make sure your using effective practices throughout the year because that’s what will show up when you’re being observed.
To sum up:
- Be prepared as best as you can.
- Engagement is critical.
- A clean and organized classroom makes a world of a difference.
- Know your observation tool.
- Ineffective/Effective practices will come to light if its been your main mode of operation throughout the school year.
Check out the free Classroom Management Plan Template or the new Mini-Training on Classroom Management