Educators and leaders spend significant time observing classrooms, conducting walkthroughs, and facilitating learning walks, but too often there is little return on the investment. If you added up the hourly wages of everyone involved, the cost of coverage, and the time dedicated to observations and debriefs, you could probably buy a unicorn. Or at the very least, a very fancy racehorse covered in glitter. Teams collect ideas, observe practices, and fill pages of notes, yet those observations don’t often lead to meaningful changes that scale across classrooms and improve outcomes for all students. Why?
The problem is not the observation itself.
The problem is that we often focus on what teachers are doing instead of what students are learning, and we stop at the visible practices without understanding the conditions that made those practices possible.
"A learning walk should not be a scavenger hunt for good ideas. It should be a process for understanding how instructional practices are influencing learners and what systems need to exist to replicate success."
A learning walk should not be a scavenger hunt for good ideas. It should be a process for understanding how instructional practices are influencing learners and what systems need to exist to replicate success. When designed thoughtfully, learning walks can become one of the most powerful forms of professional learning in a school and a driver for increased student learning.
At Novak Education, we have had the incredible opportunity to facilitate learning walks with schools all over the world. After spending thousands of collective hours in classrooms, there are a few things we have found consistently need to be true for learning walks to become meaningful opportunities for professional learning and lasting change.
In some learning walks, teams enter classrooms with broad goals such as "look for great instruction" or "notice effective practices." Although these goals are incredibly well-intentioned, they are often too broad to create a shared lens for observation. When we walk into classrooms without a more targeted purpose, everyone walks out noticing something different.
For example, imagine you are part of a learning walk and the focus is simply to look for effective practices while observing three 3rd-grade classrooms. After ten minutes, the team debriefs. One observer notices colorful anchor charts and comments on how organized and engaging the environment felt. Another highlights technology use because students appeared interested and involved. Someone else points out a strong reciprocal teaching strategy because students were actively participating in discussion. All of these observations are valuable and may provide super helpful ideas, but everyone leaves with pages of notes and very little shared understanding about what is actually driving success. Without a more targeted focus, it becomes difficult to identify meaningful patterns, determine high-leverage next steps, or understand what may actually improve outcomes for learners.
Before entering classrooms, it is super helpful for teams to spend a short amount of time discussing:
Rather than prompting teams with something broad, such as "Let's look for effective practices," it can be much more powerful to focus the learning on something more specific, such as:
"In the three 3rd-grade classrooms, let's look for evidence of instructional consistency when it comes to learning goals, success criteria, and the student experience across classrooms."
The clearer the focus, the stronger the learning.
The terms learning walks and instructional rounds are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same, as each process was designed with a slightly different purpose.
Learning walks are non-evaluative observations used to gather evidence across classrooms in order to build shared understanding, identify patterns, and inform professional learning and school improvement efforts. Teams often visit multiple classrooms for brief periods with a shared focus aligned with school goals and student outcomes. The emphasis is on gathering evidence, noticing trends, and creating opportunities for reflection and collective learning.
On the other hand, instructional rounds, developed through the work of Elizabeth City, Richard Elmore, Sarah Fiarman, and Lee Teitel, are a more structured process modeled after medical rounds. Rather than centering on a patient, instructional rounds center on the instructional core, which is the interaction among teacher, student, and content.
Instead of beginning with a shared focus area, instructional rounds begin with a problem of practice, a high-leverage challenge connected to student learning and broader school improvement efforts that a school wants to understand more deeply. Effective problems of practice are observable, actionable, and within the school's influence to address.
For example, a school might identify a problem of practice such as: "There is inconsistency in the student learning experience across classrooms, resulting in inequitable opportunities for students to develop ownership of their learning." From there, the team develops focus questions to guide evidence collection during observations and ensure that everyone is gathering information through a shared lens. For example, if the problem of practice was the lack of consistency among student experiences, focus questions may include:
Observers then gather descriptive, low-inference evidence related to that problem by examining what students are doing, what teachers are doing, and what students are being asked to do. Teams might look for evidence of whether students can articulate learning goals, monitor their progress, make choices that support their learning, or engage in meaningful self-reflection. Importantly, the purpose is not to evaluate individual teachers. Teams are trying to understand patterns across classrooms and determine what the school may need to strengthen as a system.
At first glance, the two look very similar because both involve classroom observations. In my experience, many schools talk about instructional rounds and learning walks as if they are synonymous, even though the processes were originally designed with different structures. The distinction, however, is far less important than what happens after we leave the classroom. If teams simply collect observations and move on, even the most thoughtful process can become little more than classroom tourism. The real value comes from using what was observed to strengthen professional learning, refine systems, and ultimately improve outcomes for learners.
One thing that can happen unintentionally after learning walks is that they become idea collection trips. Teams often leave saying things like, "We should all do gallery walks," "We need student goal trackers," or "Let's use those graphic organizers." While all of those ideas may be fabulous, effective practices rarely exist in isolation.
The goal of learning walks is not simply to notice what is happening in classrooms. The goal is to move beyond what we see so we can better understand why we are seeing it. Otherwise, it can be easy to replicate a visible strategy without understanding the conditions, structures, and systems that made it successful in the first place.
Imagine walking into a classroom where students are leading thoughtful discussions, respectfully challenging one another's thinking, and making meaningful connections to prior learning. It can be tempting to leave thinking, "We need to do more student discussions." However, the discussion itself is likely only the visible part of what is happening.
Beneath the surface, there may be clearly defined learning goals, explicit teaching of discussion routines, collaborative norms, a strong classroom culture, teacher modeling, and protected planning time that support the educator in designing those experiences intentionally.
The discussion itself is only the tip of the iceberg.
If we replicate only what we see, we often become frustrated when the practice does not produce the same results in our own classrooms or schools. Instead, learning walks should encourage teams to ask deeper questions:
When we understand what sits beneath the surface of the amazing strategies we observe, we move beyond replicating strategies and begin building capacity.
The observation itself is not where the greatest learning occurs. The most valuable work often begins once teams leave the classroom and come back together to make sense of what they observed.
Too often, learning walks end with a collection of notes and interesting ideas, but the conversation never moves beyond what people liked or found interesting. Instead, teams should come together while observations are fresh and discuss what patterns they noticed, what evidence suggested students were learning, what practices appeared connected to positive outcomes, and what conditions may have supported those practices.
The goal is not to leave saying, "That teacher did something I want to try." The goal is to think more strategically and ask, "What can we strengthen across our system so more students experience this?"
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If you are looking to make learning walks more meaningful and move beyond collecting observations to creating lasting change, we would love to support you. Reach out to learn more about how Novak Education can partner with your school or district to design learning walks that strengthen professional learning, build coherence, and ultimately improve outcomes for learners.