‘Lesson observation: new approaches, new possibilities’
Opening Conference Keynote Speech by Dr Matt O’Leary, University of
Wolverhampton – 17th June 2015
Thanks Alan for opening today’s conference on such a positive note. It’s
wonderful to see such a large and vibrant gathering here today. And not just
any ordinary gathering! You’re part of a community that’s here IN SPITE OF
rather than BECAUSE OF recent policy initiatives.
I feel really excited about today’s conference and as I speak, I can feel the
adrenalin coursing through my veins. It’s a feeling I’ve come to experience at
times throughout my career in teaching when you can see the difference you
make to the lives of others. And it’s a feeling that makes you feel alive and
know that when you experience it, that’s no place you’d rather be!
Before I start my talk this morning I’d like to take the opportunity to thank
some of the people behind the scenes who have been involved in putting this
conference together, in particular Rajinder Kaur, Laura Janavicius, Steve Male,
Ellen Bagley and Louise Clewer, all of whom have been excellent colleagues to
work with in making this event happen. It’s a great example of the power of
collaboration and that’s an important message I want to return to later on in
my talk.
One of the things that was at the forefront of my mind in putting together the
list of speakers for this conference was to make sure they were people who are
all INVOLVED with observation in differing capacities in an APPLIED context.
People who occupy that interface between policy and practice and are
INVOLVED in that very real, grounded work of mediating and making sense of
policy. And the collection of speakers that we have at today’s conference I
hope reflects that.
©Matt O’Leary June 2015 – No part of this speech should be reprinted, reproduced or used without
the permission of the author.
And, of course, if we’re serious about teaching becoming an EVIDENCE-BASED
PROFESSION – which is an idea that has attracted growing interest in recent
years – then we need to start engaging with some of the evidence generated
by the profession itself in colleges, schools and universities throughout the
country, and again I hope today’s conference is an opportunity for us to begin
to do that.
SHOW SLIDE 2
As Mel Ainscow (2015: 22) argues in a book called, Towards Self-improving
School Systems: ‘Evidence is the engine for change. We can use it to create
space for re-thinking and to focus our attention on overlooked possibilities for
moving practice forward’. And it is with that thought in mind that I’d like to
begin today’s talk.
There are 2 key things that I’d like to do during the course of my talk. The first
is to share with you my views as to where I think we are at present with the
use of observation in the education system in this country. And the second is
to say where I think we NEED to be and what this implies for the teaching
profession as a whole. So there’s a dual purpose to this talk. It’s both a call for
critical reflection on current practice but equally a call for collective action.
SHOW SLIDE 3
Does anyone know what this plant is? It’s Japanese knotweed. The knotweed
was originally introduced to Britain from Japan as an ornamental plant in the
early 19th century. It may look like a harmless plant, but it’s actually become a
menace to many homeowners across the country. So invasive a plant is the
knotweed that it has even been known to burrow under the very foundations
of buildings, appeared under the floorboards and penetrated the walls. Let’s
just say that once it establishes itself, it’s very difficult to get rid of. Ultimately,
the Japanese knotweed is a stubborn weed that’s an unwelcome visitor. And
like any stubborn weed, unless you’re able get to their roots, you won’t deal
©Matt O’Leary June 2015 – No part of this speech should be reprinted, reproduced or used without
the permission of the author.
with them properly and they simply continue to appear over and over again. I
see the Japanese knotweed as a metaphor for the way in which observation
has been conceptualised and applied in the English education system over the
last few decades.
Performance-driven models of observation have come to symbolise the allencompassing colonisation of the Japanese knotweed. They are the
manifestation of a much more deep rooted, chronic problem that underpins
the very foundations of the education system in this country, and has done so
for years. A problem that Hall and O’Shea (2013) refer to as ‘common-sense
neoliberalism’ and Stephen Ball (2015) as ‘necessarian logic’ that has resulted
in the reallocation of authority away from classroom teachers and local
authorities, for example, to policy makers, education technocrats and senior
managers and leaders. This necessarian logic has championed a form of
competitive, market-driven individualism in education.
It’s a logic that was coincidentally echoed in Ofsted’s Chief Inspector, Sir
Michael Wilshaw’s so-called radical speech only this Monday outlining the
changes to the Common Inspection Framework. If any of you were present at
his speech or heard it, if you closed your eyes and didn’t know who it was, you
could have very easily mistaken it for a speech by Alan Sugar or Digby Jones. If
you haven’t had the chance to see it yet, then I recommend you seek out
Debra Kidd’s incisive analysis of it in her blog entry she posted on Monday. As
Debra points out, you’d be hard pushed to find much mention of teachers in
his speech. Lots of references to leaders: good leaders, outstanding leaders,
exceptional leaders but very little mention of teachers or anyone else for that
matter, other than LEADERS, who make an important contribution to the
educational attainment of the students we teach. The overriding message
being that all you need to be a successful college or school is to have a great
leader at the helm! Well, thanks for that erudite insight into the complex work
that goes on in classrooms and the education system in this country Sir
Michael! It’s nice to know you’re earning every penny of your £200k+ salary,
©Matt O’Leary June 2015 – No part of this speech should be reprinted, reproduced or used without
the permission of the author.
which the British public pays for by the way, by sharing such pearls of wisdom
with us!
There’s a part of me that wonders, albeit with a tinge of regret, why Sir
Michael didn’t follow his thinking through to its logical conclusion in the new
Common Inspection Framework and just do away with observing and
evaluating teachers and students altogether and just focus on evaluating the
quality of leadership. Now that certainly would be radical! No offence to all
those senior leaders and managers present here today! I’m just taking my lead
(pardon the pun!) from Sir Michael so please don’t shoot the messenger!
SHOW SLIDE 4
But wait a minute! I’m getting a bit carried away with myself here! I need to
calm down a little. We need to remind ourselves that we’re entering a new
dawn; a new beginning after all as far as the use of observation is concerned,
with the end of graded lesson observations in inspections, aren’t we?
CLICK ON SOUND CLIP on SLIDE 4
Well it’s certainly true that we find ourselves in a place where very few people
would have predicted only a few years’ ago – the removal of graded lesson
observations from Ofsted’s inspection framework for schools and now more
recently Further Education colleges and providers.
For someone who has spent the last decade of my career exposing the
shortcomings of reductionist practices like graded observations and
highlighting their counterproductive effects on the professional lives of
teachers, not to mention the massive question marks surrounding the validity
and reliability of such practice from an assessment perspective, you’d be right
©Matt O’Leary June 2015 – No part of this speech should be reprinted, reproduced or used without
the permission of the author.
in thinking that I welcome this policy shift. Make no mistake, it’s an important
step in the right direction. And for this, Lorna Fitzjohn and before her, Mike
Cladingbowl, for schools – are to be commended for listening and responding
to the views and experiences of practitioners and the compelling EVIDENCE
presented during the course of this debate.
There’s a valuable lesson to be learnt here for practitioners and policy makers
alike about how powerful teacher voice can be when captured and
communicated effectively. And how, despite decades of continuous
government intervention, or interference as some would see it (!), there ARE
messages of hope, windows of opportunity for the profession to wrestle back
some of the professional autonomy and authority that has so steadily been
stripped away from teachers since the 1980s. Teachers’ knowledge, experience
and expertise is all too often undervalued or even ignored when it comes to
education policy. But it’s important for all of us to continue to challenge policy
makers and resist policy that we know is not in the common good of the
profession or the people we teach.
Yet, without wanting to underplay the significance of this policy shift, I’d argue
that it’s only the beginning; a small victory in a bigger battle that faces teachers
across all sectors.
I’ve argued for some time now that simply removing grades from the
observation process is not a panacea. The mere act of doing away with lesson
observation grades won’t suddenly result in it becoming a transformative tool
that wipes clean the lived experiences and mindsets of those staff who have
come to view its use cautiously (and with justification) as a punitive,
disciplinary mechanism. The reality is that, like two mature adults embarking
on a new relationship later on in life, for many teachers observation carries
with it a certain degree of emotional baggage. And once you open up that
baggage, a pattern starts to emerge that does not just tell the story of ONE
individual’s experiences, but a collective narrative of more systemic issues
©Matt O’Leary June 2015 – No part of this speech should be reprinted, reproduced or used without
the permission of the author.
concerning cultures of teaching and learning, power, trust and control. And
the findings from the UCU research project into the use and impact of
observation on the professional lives of those working in FE are a compelling
illustration of this (UCU 2013).
Until underlying political and epistemological issues surrounding the use of
observation as a method of assessment and ultimately as a means of managing
teachers’ work are confronted, and by that I mean issues relating to
professional autonomy, judgement and how we attempt to capture the
complexities of teaching and learning in the context of teacher evaluation,
then the removal of grades runs the risk of being little more than a superficial
change that’s unlikely to have a lasting and sustainable impact on practice in
the workplace.
In spite of Ofsted’s recent change in stance, there is a concern amongst many
teachers that this hasn’t or won’t necessarily lead to a change in the mindsets
and working practices of some senior managers/leaders in colleges and schools
who, going back to the earlier reference to Ball’s argument about the
reallocation of authority, in some cases have become institutionalised to see
part of their role as internal Ofsted teams. ‘Old habits die hard’ as the saying
goes, and the reliance of some on the grading of teachers’ classroom practice
on an annual basis has become firmly engrained in the performance
management systems of many institutions.
From a management perspective, there’s undoubtedly an allure about the
quick and easy nature of attaching a number to a teacher’s performance that
may ultimately prove a stubborn practice to change. ‘How do we measure and
monitor quality if we’re not going to grade anymore?’ is a question I hear all
the time. But for me it’s the wrong question as it’s based on circular reasoning.
The very premise on which this question is built is just as devoid of proof as the
outcome itself. In other words, it’s a question that’s built on the premise that
the phenomena you’re purporting to measure in the first place is actually
©Matt O’Leary June 2015 – No part of this speech should be reprinted, reproduced or used without
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measurable and that it can be measured scientifically in a consistently reliable
way. The allocation of a grade to classroom observations has never been, nor
will it ever be a practice that is consistently reliable. There are very good
reasons for that and no amount of tinkering is going to make it more scientific,
which is why we’re barking up the wrong tree focusing on that.
For decades there’ve been debates around the quality of teaching and
attempts to capture what it means to be an excellent teacher. In recent years,
the desire to ‘measure’ what excellence and/or effectiveness in teaching might
mean has seen the rise of a catalogue of research studies internationally, often
equipped with quantitative instruments that purport to be able to capture this.
Yet the reality is not one of them has been able to do so. Not because these
tools are necessarily flawed in themselves, although if I’m being honest the
vast majority are (!), but more importantly because teaching is NOT an exact
science that lends itself to transparent measurement. Teaching, and education
as a whole, is a HUMAN system not a MECHANICAL system. It’s about people!
And a complex system to boot! As Shulman reminds us:
SHOW SLIDE 5 + READ QUOTE
SHOW SLIDE 6
If we take classrooms and teaching and learning as an example of a complex,
non-linear system, we can see that they’re made up of different elements that
are largely defined by their iterative connections, which makes them
unsuitable for studying or measuring by traditional linear systems of scientific
analysis as, unlike phenomena in the natural world measured by calibrated
instruments like thermometers, there are no transparent cause and effect
connections. So to use a concrete example, student achievement is not solely
dependent on the quality of teaching.
©Matt O’Leary June 2015 – No part of this speech should be reprinted, reproduced or used without
the permission of the author.
The arrows in this illustration (SLIDE 6) indicate that all elements are dynamic,
and that these elements of the system can only be properly understood in
terms of their interactions and relations with other elements in and beyond
the system, and not in isolation. In other words, the model of classrooms as
complex adaptive systems is RELATIONAL. But complexity theory and its
application to classrooms is not a specialism of mine to be honest. And I know
that’s one of the things Phil Wood will be touching on in his keynote this
afternoon and I simply can’t compete with his level of knowledge and
understanding of the matter so I’ll move on for now!
So let’s just return to Ofsted for a moment and reflect on its current position
when it comes to evaluating the quality of educational provision. What we
know is that inspectors are not supposed to give grades to any of the lessons
they observe during inspections, but – and it’s a big BUT – they should still
allocate an overall grade for the quality of Teaching, Learning and Assessment.
And when it comes to deciding this grade, inspectors are expected to do so by
drawing on other sources of evidence e.g. student achievement rates, the
written feedback on student's work, speaking to students during the inspection
etc rather than pooling grades from individual observations and arriving at an
aggregate as they may have done in the past.
When I met with Mike Cladingbowl (Ofsted’s previous National Director for
Schools) in May last year and he told me that Ofsted were planning to remove
graded observations from school inspections, I asked him how he intended to
prepare inspectors for the change in policy and what he thought the wider
repercussions would be for Ofsted’s assessment framework. What I was
getting at with these questions was: firstly, a change in procedure does not
necessarily equate to a change in practice. In other words, simply asking
observers not to grade lessons any more does not deal with the wider issue of
how they conceptualise their role; and secondly, the decision to remove
individual lesson grades from the inspection process has much more farreaching consequences for the way in which Ofsted (or any other organisation
for that matter!) seeks to assess the quality of educational provision. If, as
©Matt O’Leary June 2015 – No part of this speech should be reprinted, reproduced or used without
the permission of the author.
Mike Cladingbowl argued in his position paper last June, attaching a grade to a
one-off, episodic event like a lesson observation is no longer deemed fit for
purpose, then this inevitably raises the question of why stop at observations?
Why shouldn’t the same logic be extended to the removal of grades from the
inspection process as a whole? If it’s serious about meaningful reform, isn’t it
about time Ofsted also did away with this unreliable and divisive categorisation
of educational provision according to its 4-point scale? After more than two
decades of Ofsted inspections, it seems to me that if the inspectorate is to
continue then there is a strong case for moving towards an assessment
framework that simply operates on a ‘meets requirements/doesn’t meet
requirements‘ or ‘good enough/not good enough’ basis.
Another recent example of ‘Tinkering’ with the system in terms of the
observation of practice is the introduction of exercises like ‘Learning walks’.
Where have they come from? I think we all know the answer to that question
and the eyes all point towards one prime suspect! Ofsted! Ofsted introduces
no-notice inspections and hey presto, as if by magic, ‘learning walks’ appear.
But what exactly are learning walks? I know that some senior leaders and
managers will try to justify them as being an important exercise in capturing
the ‘reality’ of classroom teaching because, as the argument goes, by not
giving teachers time to prepare in advance etc then you’re more likely to get a
realistic picture of classroom practice. Well that’s all very well in an institution
that boasts a proven culture of collaboration, where there’s an open and
collegial working environment and where observations are seen as a genuinely
supportive exercise, but in reality, they’re merely another gimmick that
trivialises the complexities of teaching and learning.
If I was a teacher in a college/school nowadays and was being subjected to
learning walks I wouldn’t be happy about it. In fact, I’d be very angry. How dare
someone seek to categorise my teaching or what my students are learning on
the basis of a 10-minute snapshot! Despite the purported rationale that is used
to justify learning walks, their whole methodology is flawed. It’s built on the
©Matt O’Leary June 2015 – No part of this speech should be reprinted, reproduced or used without
the permission of the author.
premise that what’s going on in classrooms can be simplistically observed in 10
minutes. We’re back to the issue of circular reasoning again!
In fact, I have recurring nightmares about learning walks. Each time I wake up
thinking I’m in a scene from the Shawshank Redemption where the governor
of the prison flexes his muscles by carrying out unannounced inspections of
the prisoners’ cells. And in one particular scene where the governor makes
such an unannounced spot check, one of the prisoners who happens to be
cleaning the prison floor when he gets wind of the spot check and wants to
alert his fellow inmates to it – otherwise known as COLLABORATION – shouts
‘they’re tossing the cells’. Well, that’s exactly what ‘Learning Walks’ are;
they’re an exercise in senior leaders and managers tossing the classrooms!
Such practice is built on a premise of mistrust and control rather than a
genuine desire to capture the reality of classrooms. Senior managers and
leaders take on the mantle of the prison governor and for some it becomes a
very conscious exercise in reminding teachers that like prisoners encaged in
Bentham’s Panopticon, they are subject to constant surveillance. As Foucault
(1977: 201) reminds us: ‘surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is
discontinuous in its action’.
SHOW SLIDE 9
I’m sure we’re all familiar with this optical illusion. What do you see in the
picture? The face of the old lady with a pointed chin, large nose, mouth slightly
open? Or the younger woman turning her face away, the profile of whose nose
and eyelashes you can just about make out? Sometimes it’s only when one
image is explicitly pointed out to us that we begin to see it. For decades, the
main lens through which many people have experienced observation has been
a summative lens; a lens which has used observation as a ranking device, a tool
for evaluating and sorting teachers. My argument is that it’s time to switch
lenses. But just because you switch lenses, like the optical illusion here, it
doesn’t mean to say that you necessarily lose sight of the other image or that it
goes away completely. It just means that your mind chooses to focus on
©Matt O’Leary June 2015 – No part of this speech should be reprinted, reproduced or used without
the permission of the author.
something else more often than the other. I accept that there is an argument
for the use of observation for both summative, and formative purposes, and
indeed, when intelligently combined, these two can complement each other
well.
For all those of you that know me and know my work, then I don’t need to tell
you what a firm believer and supporter I am of the INTELLIGENT use of
observation. Observation has great potential as a medium for teacher learning,
but to date, it’s rarely been given the room to grow as the common-sense
neoliberal performance management agenda, like the invasion of Japanese
knotweed I referred to earlier, has colonised the space in which it operates and
with that its ability to foster teacher learning and growth.
One of the biggest challenges that lies ahead concerns the way in which the
profession conceptualises the use of a mechanism like observation. Grades or
no grades, the next stage of the debate needs to confront the long standing
issue of how the profession breaks free from the assessment straitjacket that
has conceptually constrained the way in which it has engaged with observation
for decades.
SHOW SLIDE 9
SHOW SLIDE 10
For too long the emphasis on the use of observation has prioritised the
SORTING of teachers rather than SUPPORTING them. It’s where every previous
government minister and policy maker has gone wrong. Now is the time for
rebalancing those scales. If you want to make a real, sustainable difference to
improving the quality of teaching, SUPPORTING rather than sorting and
sacking teachers is where our energies need to be focused. But if we wait for
government and its aligned agencies to show us the lead then we’re only likely
©Matt O’Leary June 2015 – No part of this speech should be reprinted, reproduced or used without
the permission of the author.
to end up feeling disappointed and merely perpetuate that trend of
necessarian logic and being done to. And as the inimitable Frank Coffield has
argued previously (e.g. Coffield 2014), policy makers have had so many
attempts to get it right, yet still they continue to fail us. And why is that?
Because the answer lies much closer to home in the wealth of knowledge and
experience of practitioners in colleges, schools and universities across this
country.
SHOW SLIDE 11
I’d argue that we need to build on Ainscow’s advice and take it a step further
by NOT waiting for policy makers to afford us the opportunity of those spaces
‘to make use of the expertise and creativity that lies trapped within individual
classrooms’ BUT by taking control of those spaces ourselves now in our
workplaces and asserting the professional autonomy that will allow us to
confront the very imbalance of SORTING vs SUPPORTING teachers through the
medium of observation. It is time therefore for practitioners across the country
to reclaim observation as a medium on which to build sustainable,
collaborative communities of teacher learning, united by a collective pursuit to
further our understanding of the complexities of teaching and learning and
with it a renewed sense of PROFESSIONALISM. And I really hope that today’s
conference can act as a catalyst for us all to be part of that pursuit by
beginning to share and discuss our work and interest in this important area of
practice.
References
Ainscow, M. (2015) Towards Self-Improving School Systems: Lessons from a
City Challenge. Abingdon: Routledge.
Ball, S. J. (2015) ‘Back to Basics: repoliticising education,’ Forum 57(1), 7-10.
©Matt O’Leary June 2015 – No part of this speech should be reprinted, reproduced or used without
the permission of the author.
Coffield, F (2014) Beyond Bulimic Learning: Improving Teaching in Further
Education. London: IoE Press.
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish – The Birth of the Prison.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hall, S. & O’Shea, A. (2013) ‘Common-sense neoliberalism’, Chapter 4, Kilburn
Manifesto. London: Soundings. Available at:
https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/pdfs/Manifesto_commonsens
e_neoliberalism.pdf Accessed 21/5/2015.
Shulman, L. S. (2004). The wisdom of practice: Essays on teaching, learning,
and learning to teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
University and College Union (UCU) (2009) Lesson Observation: UCU
Guidelines. Available at: http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=2969
©Matt O’Leary June 2015 – No part of this speech should be reprinted, reproduced or used without
the permission of the author.