Is your school doing online observations and walkthroughs

[Workyticket]

Mine announced yesterday that SLT would be dropping in AND doing full observations

32 teachers - I'm the only one who's visibly kicking up a fuss.

Ours was going to, announced it and everything, but then after uproar from staff they cancelled it...They can react to staff pressure...occasionally...

There’s all kinds of daft ness going on....so obviously all the planning for remote teaching and making different resources, but at our place, also wheeling out several new initiatives which require meetings, focus groups and production of lots of paperwork. I mean....is it really the right moment for that stuff?

Agree. Our SLT seem to have more time on their hands now. Probably because they no longer have to spend their time parading the corridors helping with behaviour. As a result, they are coming up with all sorts of shit. They have no understanding that, as a normal teacher, I have less extra time teaching online full time. I'm adapting everything for online and it takes ages.

Hi all, new to this section but not MN.
I’m a primary teacher who already feels done over because of an exceptionally large bubble. (30+) that we decided to spilt in 2, thus creating 2 bubbles in our year group. No previous consultation with us and not much support. Only year group with this size.

Now they’ve chosen our year group to ‘drop in on’ for live sessions this week. I’m livid.

Ffs this is outrageous

@kit I deleted all my managers from my Teams. I've not been bollocking yet and don't particularly care if they kick off.

Bollocked**

my colleague was observed last week. Tild her pace was too slow because of waiting for students to answer

Students who are shushing children / their siblings etc... students who are on mute becayse their house is too noisy and chaotic not to be...

We've spent years being told we don't give enough thinking time when asking questions. I am livid on her behalf and have helped her draft her response to feedback!

I have been told I am having a member of slt ‘pop into’ my lesson next week - in other words a lesson observation.

I saw this which made me chuckle

Sorry didn’t attach photo to post above

@Workyticket we have Google Classroom, so if they’re joining for their account linked to the school, they don’t need permission.

I drafted an email late last night but didn’t send it. Instead I’ve asked for a meeting with my Head. I was very frank 3 weeks ago and told them, along with other things, that the double bubble was very difficult to manage. And now this. I honestly don’t understand what their rationale is.

I’m actually laughing at slow pace. Doesn’t that just show how completely out of touch they are.

There was a TES article about 10% of staff being observed online.

I asked why we were in the 10% and not the 90% who aren't. Was there a problem with our work? Had there been complaints? What was the reasoning behind it...

They replied with 'how else will we monitor teaching?'

I asked them to ask the 90% of schools... ours have now stopped

The colleague who was observed requested it as part of her probation**

I’ll use those stats, thank you.
It’s just all knee jerk reactions, I suspect in response to parents as the email was very parent focused, rather than learning focused.

I have had the head add himself to my GCSE class, joined for the whole lesson to observe and then received formal feedback.

How was it trying? I think it’s shocking to put teachers under even more stress.
I’ve just been told today that I’m being observed next week.
I’m thinking about trying to explain that I’m stressed enough but I don’t suppose they’ll listen. I can’t believe they’re doing this to us.

I’m in two minds, and apologies if I offend anyone. On one hand, it feels stressful to be observed online. I’ve had a couple of ‘pop ins’ from my line manager and didn’t enjoy them (I wouldn’t care in the real classroom at all). However, I know for a fact that the standard of online teaching is pretty low across the school. I am having to teach all TEAMS skills to my classes from scratch, which begs the question of what on Earth they can be doing in the other 20 hours per week? There must be a hell of a lot of ‘listen to me for a while and then email me your notes’ because the whole business of completing assignments, accessing returned assignments, working on live editable word documents and so on is alien to any child below Year 10. So, rather than get hyped up, I am trying to see the pop ins as a positive step leading to a hopeful rise in overall standards over the next couple of weeks. It will honestly make my job easier with key stage 3 if I’m not trying to single handedly train them in TEAMS before teaching them any subject knowledge.

But maybe there’s a training need amongst the teachers?
No one needs to observe my lessons to know that I can’t use teams. I can tell them that. We have supposedly been trained but I do not know what I am doing. We went straight to a full timetable of live lessons on teams week one. There has been no time to learn. I am muddling through the best I can but I know I’m doing a shit job. I can’t teach what I don’t know how to do myself!
Maybe schools should have focussed their IT curriculum on using their online platform last term so the students knew something?
It’s clear that some teachers have embraced this online teaching and are enjoying the new adventure but many of us aren’t. I have 2 primary aged dc I am trying to support with their schoolwork (on a different platform), a crappy laptop that crashes all the time, and I am sitting for 6 hours a day at a piece of plywood balanced on trestles because I don’t have a desk or room for one so my back and shoulders are agony.
I’m a pretty good teacher normally but right now I am hanging on by my finger tips. I don’t need more stress.

@CuckooCuckooClock it was ok and went well. I got good feedback but I was lucky I had a very good class who had completed the previous work well so I was able to link from last lesson to the present and he picked that up. The class did not want to participate through audio but we're very good using the chat function. However, I can imagine if he observed me with my challenging less engaged Year 8 class it would have been a very different story. He emailed me on a Friday afternoon to say he would be observing Monday morning so I spent the whole weekend stressing about it. I think I was more angry about that, as I felt I could not relax all weekend with the worry.

I’m glad to hear it went well. I think I’m feeling really angry too. If there’s one time that slt could just say ‘we know you’re doing your best and we trust you’ it’s now. I don’t need feedback because I know I’m doing lots of things wrong. I’m having so much trouble assessing students and I really don’t know who’s learning what, if anything at all, but all the solutions to this issue require time and energy that I just don’t have right now.
I’ve spent all morning crying and now I’m working through year 12 calculations which will take all afternoon even though less than half have submitted. Killing 15 mins on mn is my only respite.

Sorry that you’re having a mare @CuckooCuckooClock and I’m sorry if my comments made you feel even worse. I do understand your points and acknowledge that I have the advantage of a) a very good school laptop and b) a partner to take the lion’s share of home schooling our own two DC while I become some sort of unlikely Microsoft expert (I have never really used tech before EVER so this is a new venture).
I would be very grateful for our eldest getting any maths teaching online - however low tech - since his primary school is providing none and tears of frustration were shed by both son and father over a twinkl worksheet yesterday.
Not great times, are they?

Thanks likeafish you didn’t make me feel worse. I’m just having a shit time. I know loads of people are coping better than I am and are managing to deliver decent lessons and probably my colleagues think I’m a total idiot for not being able to set work in assignments so the students can edit and it’s really humiliating to do something you are crap at for 5 hours a day with a parental audience. I guess it’s just destroyed my clearly quite fragile confidence.

I've had an observation but I have just started the job recently. My line manager wrote she had absolutely no concerns about me but would have to observe me at some point. She offered me to say when - as in now or out of lockdown. I said now please as I had a lesson I was really happy with planned , and I just wanted it out of the way. Irs been a bit tough starting a new job in a really challenging sen class (I am an experienced sen teacher this said but even so) and not having had any slt input so I invited her to come.

I'm glad I did rather than waiting I think

Shocked to see how many are being observed

I'm becoming a keyboard warrior. One of my colleagues is off with stress - I had to cover a live lesson (oh the fucking joy, my own are hard enough) and the HoD said "add me to the Team. I'll drop in to see how you're getting on"

Me: "I'm not happy to do that. If you want me to teach an unknown class live I will but I don't want chexking in on. I can drop asynchronous work on for them instead and you can check that if you prefer but if you are free then you could take the lesson"

Nice. I love ‘if you are free you can take the lesson’
How nice would it be if instead of being observed right now, slt offered to actually help if they have free time?

I’ve just had an observation this morning with written feedback (cc’ed to SLT). Nothing actually fucking useful, just another way of putting staff under more stress.