Conducting Teacher Observations in GoReact

Debra Lively:

We have that planning and then we have the actual observation using GoReact. And if you’re not familiar with GoReact, I’m going to show a slide that will just show the video part and the comment part. But you use markers. They’re called markers or tags.

We have rubrics at the university as well as in districts, there are rubrics. And you take the common theme. Let’s say it knows the content, the teacher knows their content. Well that might be a C. Well, you can make markers to fit your rubrics. So that’s really important.

My suggestion would be don’t use so many, 20 different markers or tags because that gets overwhelming and you forget what they are. But use key ones that the teacher, you and the teacher might decide on what markers or tags you want to use or they want to focus on.

We want to have comments that encourage thinking. We want to probe asking questions. Paraphrasing is so important. Paraphrasing clarifies what the teacher hopes to accomplish.

And thinking routines might be new to you, but it’s something I had training in from Harvard’s Project Zero. Our district for two years, we really focused on using thinking routines in classrooms to create a culture of thinking. Well, they can be used to enhance teacher reflection too because they’re simple, they’re quick, they’re routine based, and our brains work with routine based information.

And then the effective feedback. And I’m going to talk more about this, but I was probably the emperor of good job, way to go, high five. I don’t use that anymore. And I’ve learned through the years not to use that, and to think about what is effective when we talk about feedback.

And then of course the paralinguistics. Now you can’t do the paralinguistics unless you use capital letters in your writing like you’re shouting. Paralinguistics is used either through a video format or in a person format. But anyway, so this is the observation.

So now you’ve had your planning, now you have your observation.