I vividly remember being in a faculty meeting in my NQT year [my NQT year was my fourth year teaching because I worked as an unqualified teacher prior to my PGCE] and my mentor printing us all copies of one of Adam Boxer’s blogs about the “slow practical” and absolutely fawning over it. And I’m sitting there reading it, thinking “no sh!t. Who isn’t doing this?” Well, turns out, a lot of people.
As an NQT I had my own lab. I didn’t really leave it. I was new, I was shy [yes, really], I’ve been reliably informed I'm “a bit odd”, so I kept myself to myself. We didn’t have a culture of observing others [I once asked to observe a colleague as part of my NQT provision; they said they could cover me for the first 15 minutes of the lesson and nothing more] so I never saw anyone else teach and I rarely interacted with others. Essentially the only time I spoke with anyone else in my department was during the fortnightly Department Meetings. But the following year I all but lost my lab. Someone else was timetabled there twice a week so I had to vacate, and I moved to a desk in the Science Office. When the pandemic arrived in spring of 2020, that temporary desk became my permanent home. [In hindsight, moving everyone into a shared office during a respiratory pandemic was a terrible idea; half my department was out last week, and I’m writing this from home with a persistent cough, but anyway] Moving into the office felt revolutionary. Which might be slightly hyperbolic. But it was a significant eye-opener. In the office I could talk with others. I could get the smallest insight into their teaching. And I realised that what I was doing wasn’t normal. My colleagues weren’t walking students through practicals in little baby steps because they’re children and have no idea what they’re doing when they start and giving them a whole-ass method is super overwhelming. They weren’t carefully picking the questions to go at the start of the lesson to check students have the foundational knowledge that they’re planning to build on; they were just picking five questions from a bank of “stuff they’ve done before”. They were also doing a lot of marketplace activities. And this isn’t a criticism of my department, this is just what it was like, and I do not blame them - if you don’t have a place where you can discuss what’s working and what’s not, it can be very easy to blame yourself; you assume that this, whatever it is, works fine for everyone else and you’re the only one in the world for whom the kids muck about instead of doing discovery learning activities. Now, I’m not cocky enough to say you’ve got to do it this way or that way; if what you’re doing is working, I’m not really in a place to tell you to stop [but for real, stop with the marketplace nonsense].
Part of the problem, along with none of us using the office, was a lack of opportunity to observe each other. If you’ve got members of your department who, like me, were quite happy to sit in their own little space, never interacting with others, and you also lack a culture of “popping in” to see each other teach, you’re never gonna get good collaboration. I’m not sure you can bring together 12 people [big school; big department] and have them feel comfortable sharing ideas and vulnerabilities if the only previous communication is the odd nod-and-smile in the corridor. Maybe a “sorry, could you pass the coffee?” on the few occasions when you are in the office together. It’s not gonna happen. People don’t want to talk to relative strangers about the stuff that doesn’t work properly in their classroom. Even though a colleague might be a member of your department, if you never see them, they may as well be a stranger. When you’re used to seeing them, both in the office and popping into each other’s lessons, you build up that relationship that makes you feel more like equals. When you feel like equals, it’s easier to ask for things.
When you stand in front of the class and teach them, you sort of know what’s going on, what’s working, what maybe isn’t working so well. But when you observe someone else teaching you can see the nitty gritty. Because you don’t have to bounce your attention around all 30 students, you can watch those two at the back who are doing a very good impression of working but upon closer inspection seem to be having a covert game of noughts-and-crosses.
Before going in to observe someone it’s important to ask a few questions - what are you looking for? As an observer, it’s impossible to see everything; there’s so much going on in a classroom that you’re likely to miss one thing while looking for something else. There’s also the effect on the teacher being observed, especially if they’re early in their career. We are happy to take the cognitive load of a task into account when directing novice students, we should probably do the same for novice teachers - trying to get everything perfect is impossible, just pick a manageable number of things. Once you’ve mastered throwing and catching, then you can move onto juggling. I’ve seen [heard?, might’ve been a podcast, can’t remember, sorry] of people walking out of observations once they have something to feed back on, that’s one way to do it but that needs a solid culture otherwise you’re gonna have some poor sap freaking out like “what did I just do???”
Should you expect something different from an NQT versus an LP [yes] and how different should that be? How do you know when you’ve seen what you’re looking for? We all know how easy it is to conflate busy and engaged, engaged and learning. Know what you’re looking for before you go in - that way you’ll know if you’ve seen it.
I’ve also found observing and working in the office to be really good for reflecting on my own practice. I’ve been observed which was nice and gave me things to think about, but watching others has also made me a better teacher as well. There were things I did that when I saw someone else do I realise didn’t work very well and I should probably change. Sometimes you see yourself in your colleagues. I’ve seen things I’ve thought “ooh, that’s interesting, I’ll try that”. I’ve been able to hear how other people are doing things and take my cue from them. It’s been refreshing.
To wrap up: watch each other teach. Talk to your colleagues. Sit in the staff room.