Above the Line: The Visit Has to Go Somewhere

Above the Line: The Table She Asked For

A child cried at dinner because no one waited to eat together, the way her class does at lunch. At Alief Montessori, independence is taught by arranging the room so the habit gets practiced again and again.

Matthew Driessen said the students sometimes barely notice when he walks in for a formal evaluation.

It is because he has already been in the room.

Driessen is the superintendent and principal at DeSmet School in Montana. When I asked him about teacher evaluation, he kept pulling the conversation away from the formal observation and back toward the ordinary visits before it: the pop-in, the question, the one thing noticed, the next week.

DeSmet first came to me through the Above the Line data. Its students were performing better than context would predict. When I asked what was happening there, Driessen did not start with a rubric.

He started about ten years earlier.

When he arrived, he said, DeSmet was 638th out of 649 districts in Montana. The board was not working. The administration was not working. Teachers were going different directions. The community had lost a vision for the school.

"You can't fix something small without fixing what's above it," he said.

So the first work was not a better classroom walkthrough. It was board training. Then community vision. Then instruction.

Only after that did the classroom visits have somewhere to go.

There is a research reason to pay attention to that order. Principals are often told to get into classrooms. The advice is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Jason Grissom, Susanna Loeb, and Benjamin Master studied how principals spent their time and found that some instructional work predicted stronger student achievement gains: coaching teachers, evaluating instruction, and developing the school's educational program. Informal classroom walkthroughs, on their own, did not show the same pattern. The authors warn that walkthroughs may not help when they are disconnected from a broader school improvement strategy.¹

Driessen's walkthroughs are not disconnected.

He has an idea of what instruction should look like. He says teachers helped shape that direction. He calls it distributive leadership. But once the school decides what it is trying to do, he does not believe a teacher gets to run a separate program in the room next door.

His example was football. If the team calls a play and one player decides to do something else, the play is one player short.

That is the part that can sound harsh if it is separated from the rest of the system. Driessen is not trying to make every teacher teach like him. Near the end of our first conversation, he used a different image.

"This isn't a trumpet band," he said. "This is an orchestra."

He does not need every teacher playing the same instrument. He does need to know when someone is off key.

That is what the pop-ins are for.

He walks in. Says hi to the kids. Sits or stands in the back for a few minutes. Watches something small enough to talk about.

A student who cannot see is sitting in the back. Two students should not be next to each other. The teacher is spending too much time talking and not enough time listening. A group activity is set up well, except one student has drifted off alone.

None of that requires a dramatic post-conference. It requires the adult who saw it to say something useful.

Driessen tries to keep it to one thing. Maybe two. Usually one.

He called it "catch and release."

If the issue is the seating chart, then the feedback is about the seating chart. Move the students. Try pods instead of straight rows. Get into the room instead of staying at the front. Then he comes back.

The next visit is where the first visit gets tested.

If the teacher moved the students and it seems to be working, the conversation is simple: What worked? What is not working yet? What can I help with?

If the teacher did nothing, the conversation is different.

Can you help me understand why?

Driessen is willing to ask that softly at first. He is also willing to make clear that "I don't think it's a problem" is not always an acceptable answer. If the room is not working for kids, and the teacher has been asked to fix it, the teacher has to fix it.

That is not the language most evaluation systems use. They are more comfortable with ratings, domains, evidence boxes, and growth areas. Driessen uses those too. Montana still requires evaluation paperwork, and DeSmet still completes it.

But the real question is whether the feedback changes anything before the form is filed.

John Hattie and Helen Timperley's review of feedback research makes the same point in a broader way. Feedback can be powerful, but not all feedback is powerful. It depends on what the feedback is, how it is given, and what the person can do next.²

Driessen's answer is almost plain enough to miss: give the teacher something to do next, then look again.

That is also what keeps the formal evaluation from becoming a surprise. By the time Driessen conducts the required observation, teachers are used to him being in the room. The students are used to him being there. The conversation has already been happening in pieces all semester.

So the formal evaluation becomes a summary.

These are the things I have been seeing. These are some things that are working. These are some things we should add. These are some things we should stop doing.

A walkthrough can look like leadership from a distance. Driessen's version is even more useful up close.

One thing.

Try it.

I'll come back.