Typically, my pre-observation conferences were limited to a general overview of the teacher’s lesson plan and possibly what the teacher would like me to focus on. They probably lasted no more that 10 minutes (or less). It turns out that the pre-observation conference best should include more. 

Instead of getting an overview of the plan, a more in-depth conversation about the elements of the lesson with a focus on how modifications or improvements could be made. This will require a bit more time. It might be helpful to have a school focus…say, student engagement. As the teacher shares their plan for the observation, you could ask clarifying questions about how students are going to be engaged at different stages of the lesson. 

This could lead to a quick brainstorm of student engagement strategies and a discussion about which ones would work best. Taking a coaching stance (as opposed to a consultative stance) would work best, where you are asking your teacher questions that will deepen thinking about strategically about what will make students learn more, better, and faster. For novice teachers you may want to give a few engagement strategies from which to choose.

This will segue nicely into what types of evidence of practice would be the most appropriate to collect during the formal observation. There is always the old tried and true technique of script taping (writing down what the teacher says and how students respond as fast as you can). There are so many other types of information that can be collected, which could also be part of pre-observation conference. 

Let’s take the example above and look at what you might focus on for measuring student engagement. One strategy might be to track when and for how long specific engagement strategies were employed throughout the lesson. Another might be to have the teacher supply a copy of their seating chart and you make tally marks to indicate which students are engaging in a particular parts of the lesson. Talking about and coming to an agreement of how your will measure the focus for the lesson (in this case, student engagement) is key here. This will set the stage for a meaningful post-observation conference, where the two of you are looking at some data and talking about the implications and how this practice might be improved. Laura Lipton and Bruce Wellman refer to this as the “third point” in a learning-focused conversation (if you are interested in more information, check out their book, Learning-Focused Supervision: Developing Professional Expertise in Standards-Driven Systems).