I’ll share a personal situation that was a TERRIBLE formal observation (and what I did about it and how I shifted my mindset).
It was my first year at a new middle school and the principal at the time kept scheduling my observation and then unscheduling it multiple times… Or just didn’t show up at all. So that right there was super-stressful, thinking it was going to happen and then it wasn’t going to happen… over and over for 3-4 weeks.
Finally, on one of the many re-scheduled days, last block of the day on a Friday (of course… why is it always the last block??), we had a surprise fire drill. So I thought, well, there goes my observation. Again.
Nope!!!
We all came back inside from the fire drill and lo-and-behold there she sat in my room, ready to go!!
Did the students even know that was the principal sitting there? I don’t think it registered with them. I do remember one kid asking, “Who’s that lady?”
I began going through the motions of quickly getting back on track- I dimmed the lights, set a timer, and thank goodness the bell ringer was still up on the board from before the fire drill. This actually worked. The kiddos got busy right away.
It was when we finished and transitioned to our mini-lesson and group practice that things went downhill, and fast.
As in . . . Break up the groups, complete this independently, and we’ll try again tomorrow.
So, so embarrassing. Did I handle it right? I don’t know. I was just so done, it didn’t even matter. Totally defeated.
It was also my first year at a brand new middle school, so it’s not like I had 10 years of great results with this principal to fall back on.
What did I end up doing after the day was over?
I went to her office and asked for a re-do!! I just told her that the last class of the day, on a Friday, after a surprise fire drill was just NOT my best moment and that I didn’t want to be “judged” on that ONE DAY.
She actually was really nice about it and said it was good that I stopped the lesson and switched things up due to the craziness in the classroom. She said that’s what she would have done.
My concern was that of course it looked like I couldn’t “control” my class and that I ended up NOT doing what was in the lesson plan for the day.
She said she could come back for a re-do if I wanted OR she could “take the current circumstances into consideration” as she wrote up this evaluation.
I took a “risk” I guess you could say, and I agreed to just go with her evaluation for the day without a re-do.
I kept thinking… Whatever she writes down, whatever score I get, whatever comments are made… None of that represents who I am as a person or as a teacher. None of this will matter in the long, long run. I won’t be laid up in the nursing home bed at the age of 96 wishing I’d had a re-do observation or wishing I’d done something different that day or wishing that I’d fought for a better observation situation. It just won’t matter at the end of time.
In the moment, it can seem like a formal observation is EVERYTHING and that if you don’t get a good report, you’ll lose your job and your kids will have to eat cat food. But that’s not going to happen.
It’s not worth the energy or the sacred, limited time we all have on this earth to worry about what one person thinks of us during one particular hour.
Yes, we want to do our best. Yes, we want to teach our students. Yes, we want to have a smooth-running, well-planned observation. But when things happen beyond our control that we can’t foresee, that we can’t plan for, that we can’t undo, we CAN think about it in the grander scheme of things in order to find peace with the situation.
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