As a professional learning organization and fierce advocate for teachers and learners, we care a great deal about student achievement. However, outside of our federal grant-supported initiatives, we have intentionally focused on areas other than student assessment results as a primary outcome in our impact reporting. Here’s why.

For one thing, it’s a burden on our district partners to extract and share that information with us; data-sharing agreements are complicated and take a lot of time. Additionally, it’s often several months after the school year ends before the data can be shared, offering little in a timely way to help with our partners’ programmatic decisions.

Also, more importantly, a state assessment can’t tell us everything we need to know. In fact, as a measure to guide how we improve, standardized test results leave a lot out. Test performance is just not a nuanced enough proxy for the complexity of student learning, and there is more timely, useful formative information to help students and teachers reach their full potential.

Test performance is just not a nuanced enough proxy for the complexity of student learning, and there is more timely, useful formative information to help students and teachers reach their full potential.

Rather than waiting until the test results come in, we’re convinced it’s more important to monitor what teachers are doing in the classroom, what they are asking students to do, and what students are actually doing, and we do that through observation. It’s how we help our partners assess if they are creating the conditions that are effective predictors of substantive learning. In other words, we zero in on the things the literature says are important for intellectual engagement, knowledge building, and growth and development — especially for underserved students. Research shows when those practices and conditions are in place, student achievement is likely to follow.

For years, NTC has designed professional learning and supports that recognize the complex, relational, cognitive, and developmental processes involved in teaching and learning. We have partnered with some of the leading researchers in the field to develop our Optimal Learning Environment (OLE) framework and related classroom observation instrument. Both emphasize the integrated fundamentals of social and emotional learning (SEL), learner variability/Universal Design for Learning, culturally responsive teaching, and learning environment research.

At NTC, observation is part and parcel of what we do. It’s one of three key components of what we call the teaching and coaching cycle and guides the professional conversations mentors and coaches should have with their teachers. Our expertise is centered in understanding and supporting what happens in the classroom. Conversations rooted in our IPG-based observation tool, referred to as Post-Observation Co-Analysis, provide meaningful opportunities to coach teachers toward conditions for optimal learning. (Learn more about observation indicators in the NTC case study here.)

Our expertise is centered in understanding and supporting what happens in the classroom.

We emphasize indicators that provide evidence that students are being set up for success and show they are interacting and engaging with teachers and other students around content. Specifically, we observe whether teachers are:

• providing multiple approaches to engage in content and demonstrate learning
• checking for understanding
• offering feedback to support every learner
• shifting academic struggle to students (as appropriate)
• providing examples and explanations
• modeling and explicitly addressing social and emotional competence
• conveying confidence that every student can meet high expectations and grow
• respecting diversity and learner variability

And students are:

• connecting to lesson content
• seeking and offering help
• clarifying and extending their thinking
• engaging in learning
• self-reflecting and self-regulating to support their individual learning needs

Recent advances in our understanding from neuroscience — about brain chemistry and the importance of relationships and connection in the classroom — and all the interdisciplinary research contributing to the science of learning and development and educator professional learning confirm the importance of these leading indicators.

Some might say that using classroom observations to measure the impact of our interventions and actions is not as valid or as sophisticated as student assessment results. But if we know what to look for, the classroom environment is where we should see change first. It’s also where, if we don’t see movement, real-time adjustments can be made to influence what’s happening in the classroom.

When we are trying to assess the impact of our work, we need to ask the right question. Are we helping to create learning settings in which students can engage at their highest cognitive and creative potential? Our measurement tools and how we define success along the way need to help us understand if we are doing that and, if not, how we can do better.

Lisa Schmitt, Ph.D., is senior director of Impact at New Teacher Center.