I hope that the Eudunda presentation achieved its purpose of getting us to start thinking about how we might go about developing quality teaching and learning through classroom observations at PBAS.

Key points that I got from the presentation were:

• I like the concept of One in all in. Developing a whole school agreement through discussion will be important.
• Time is required to ensure any process is effective. Time for both the development of the process as well as implementation i.e. Eudunda underloaded its secondary staff and provided release time for its primary staff. What would work at PBAS?
• Eudunda embedded ‘Quality Teaching’ into their Site Improvement Plan. Where does improving quality teaching through classroom observation sit in relation to all the other things we do at school?
• How do we embed aspects of the TfEL or the National Professional Standards for Teachers (or both) into a document that is then useful and easily used?
• Staff familiarisation with TfEL and the National Professional Standards for Teachers will be ongoing. The hot dot task was a fairly easy simple way to get staff to have a look at and think about these.
• The concept of deprivatising the classroom appealed to me. Broadening the types of pedagogy we are exposed to will be an important part of developing teacher quality.

This by no means exhausts the list of questions and issues that teachers may have about classroom observations at PBAS. They are just my initial thoughts after listening to Eudunda’s story.

Click here to read my first post on Classroom Observation written in early October.