Peer Observation

Hi, I’m Bill Mauer and I’m excited to show you how educators around the world use GoReact to support teacher growth. Today, I’m gonna talk about peer observation. Using GoReact for peer observation is a simple tool and a great strategy to grow teachers across your district or even in your school. It’s as simple as videotaping those master teachers, videotaping those nationally board certified teachers doing exemplar lessons in the classroom and then allowing your new teachers to watch that video of that teacher teach by keeping them in the classroom. This is a really affordable way to do peer observations across the district. It’s really simple to do.

Right now, you’re looking at my dashboard. My dashboard is very customizable. There’s a lot of things that we can do in here. But today we’re gonna talk about the professional learning strategy of peer observation. I’m gonna go in here into my best practice activity. These activities, you can name them whatever you want. This could be called peer observation. In this case, I call it best practice. When I go in this activity, I have multiple best practice scenarios in here. The one we’re gonna focus on is peer observation, today.

In this scenario, I have a teacher who’s fantastic with classroom management. She’s been in my district a long time. She’s a nationally board certified teacher and she said, you know what,  come into my classroom and videotape me so those new teachers that can’t get out of their classroom to come watch me, can actually still watch me teach my class to show my great classroom management strategies. I just click on that video, once this video has been recorded now we can do a peer collaboration, a peer review of what’s happening in this lesson. So, you can invite all of your new teachers to watch this specific scenario and they can all do a peer collaboration on this. I can go ahead and comment, just like I would in any other GoReact video, I really like how well behaved these kids are. It works the same way as any other gGoReact video. As soon as I hit, enter three things will happen. My comment is gonna be posted, it’s gonna be time stamped, and it’s gonna be hyperlinked. Again, the importance of that is anyone watching this video back can see my comment that I made here and if they wanted to see what part of the video I was referring to, they just click on that link and it takes them back to that point in time. You can also use markers. Again, these are customizable. Here, if we focused on maybe differentiation was a look for that we were looking at in a, in a classroom setting, I could just tag that in the video again, it’s time stamped as well.

This is a great strategy to grow your new teachers. In our rubrics button, we actually have a peer observation form. So, what I’d like to suggest is, watch this video just like you would go into a classroom with a teacher to watch her teach and answer these three questions. It’s a simple three question, peer observation form. The questions are simple, we can change them, you can make them whatever you want. Here, I just have three questions in here. What was your biggest takeaway from the observation? What will you use from this lesson in one of your future lessons? What part of this lesson mirrors what you do in your classroom? You can print these answers off, you can put them in the teacher’s file if you want to use this as part of their professional learning plan. That’s up to you again. Super simple to do a peer collaboration in here where everybody can see everyone else’s comments. You’re learning from this master teacher in this scenario.