Leading by Looking and Listening: Observation Framework to Support Equitable and Ambitious Teaching and Learning

In the wake of the events of recent years, most school leaders and educators recognize that taking equity seriously demands new attention to the instructional experiences that occupy most of students’ time in school. In what follows, we bring together key literature on ambitious teaching-learning and equitable classroom practice in an observation framework to support equitable and ambitious teaching and learning. This framework can enable school leaders to analyze classroom practice and cultivate productive instructional coaching conversations with teachers. The framework is not a means to technocratically score teacher performance. Instead, it provides an observer with four lenses to support ‘looking’ at classroom activity including attention to the 1) tasks, 2) tools, 3) talk, and 4) participant structures, while explicitly inviting attention to questions of equity and power related to instructional interactions.