Respect Teachers Instead of Inspecting Them
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why respectful conversation helps teachers improve more than inspection-style classroom visits.
Key Takeaways
- Snapshots Are Incomplete - A brief classroom visit never captures all the planning, thinking, and follow-up that make teaching effective.
- Respect Beats Inspection - Teachers improve when leaders seek to understand practice, not when they treat observations like ratings or compliance checks.
- Evidence-Based Questions Matter - Specific questions grounded in what you actually saw open productive dialogue without putting teachers on the defensive.
- Conversation Builds Understanding - Principals can only support improvement when they deeply understand a teacher’s decisions within the lesson or unit.
- Leadership Is Organizational - As principals, we’re responsible not only for evaluating individuals but also for creating conditions where teachers can succeed.
Full Transcript
inspecting teachers doesn't help them improve, but respecting them does. I think whenever instructional leaders get into classrooms, there's a tendency to view it as some sort of data collection, some sort of inspection, some sort of rating of the teacher's practice in that moment.
But if you've ever been a teacher, as hopefully you have if you're an instructional leader, you know that what's visible at any given moment is not everything that's going on, right? There are so many dimensions to teaching that happen beforehand, that happen invisibly in your head, that happen later.
You can't just take a snapshot of teaching and call it good. There's so much more to understand.
So I think if we want to help teachers improve, we have to not just inspect, we have to respect their practice and develop a deep understanding of what we're seeing and not just treat that surface inspection as all there is. And I think we need to get entirely away from that idea of inspection.
And instead, view our instructional leadership work as conversation. I like to ask questions like these ones, these 10 evidence-based questions. I noticed that you blank. Could you talk to me about how that fits within this lesson or unit?
These are genuine questions that center on evidence that you saw yourself. So we are talking about what actually happened. And then allowing the teacher to elaborate. Not to put the teacher on the defensive, not to make them justify what they did, but to allow us to really understand their practice. Only when we understand teacher practice can we help it improve. And I think our role as evaluators is tightly coupled with our role as organizational leaders, right?
If you're a principal, you are not just the evaluator of the individual teachers, you are responsible for the organization, and the success of teachers within that organization depends a great deal on the decisions you make. So we have kind of a dual responsibility,
and teachers have a responsibility as well to grow their practice. But we want to be on the same page about that, and that means we need to talk about practice. So I think we've got to stop looking at it as inspection and start looking at it as respect
and conversation. Let me know what you think.