3 steps to creating a successful team drop-in culture

Picture this: You’re a first-year math educator and your students are struggling with fractions. During your planning period, you decide to drop in on a fellow teacher’s classroom. When you arrive, their students are working independently on fractions in stations. Your class might not be ready for that, but you can see the students are gaining proficiency, so you make a note to try it. You head for another class and find students facing the same challenge as yours. Your colleague gets them to play a fraction game in groups, and the students go from frustrated to invested. Jackpot! By the end of your planning period, you’ve added two tools to your toolkit: the group activity you’ll use with your students tomorrow, and the station rotation you’ll try next week.

In our elementary school, teachers can have these inspiring experiences every week. The mentorship and coaching supervisor created a peer observation process to support teachers at our building and throughout the district. Next, the principal, coach and mentorship supervisor and assistant principal adapted it to be utilized for all staff at the school and worked to make sure that all staff had access to this opportunity. After a year of promoting peer drop-ins, we’ve seen our early-career educators become more confident and our whole team become more cohesive. Our educators feel valued for their strengths but comfortable seeking help with challenges. In our experience, schoolwide peer drop-ins succeed when they provide three things for teachers: value, agency and time. Here’s how we make that happen for our staff:

1. Promoting value:

The idea for a drop-in initiative came from our shared experience supporting and coaching early-career teachers. Their number-one wish is always to see and understand how experienced educators use the same curriculum to teach and inspire the same student communities. They want “apples-to-apples” professional development. They want to define PD to meet instructional goals and student needs. And they want PD to be accessible all the time because they’re striving to improve all the time. We leaders can’t always provide everything for our teams – but this empowering PD experience is something we can provide. 

We created 3 forms to support this process:

• A feedback card titled “I came to visit you today” for affirmations. Teachers display the cards outside classroom doors when it’s a good time for a drop in. The observer uses the card to share appreciation for the strategies they found useful and validate their colleague’s expertise. 

(Feedback card via educator Ángela Martínez)

• A reflection sheet for next steps. Teachers use this to note strategies, examples and follow-up questions. This encourages educators to seek out the tools and solutions they need but stay open to new ideas, too.

• A professional learning form for long-term growth. Teachers use this to define the apples-to-apples resource they needed, reflect on what they found and make connections to practice goals.

2. Planning for agency:

When teams have agency to structure their own PD based on instructional goals and student needs, they invest more deeply in growth. We make sure every teacher has our master schedule, including content area blocks and small group vs. whole group instruction. We encourage educators to pencil in times they can observe colleagues teaching literacy in small groups or social studies to the whole class. Next, we put a few “learning walk days” on the calendar so we can all try drop-ins together. We ask for input on dates in staff meetings to promote team ownership, and we ask teacher leaders to build up new educators’ confidence about participating. Drop-ins are never required. But if you walk around our building, you’ll find 90% of our teachers have their feedback cards outside their doors – not just on learning walk days, but every day!

Over time, we build up knowledge we can use to honor teacher expertise, promote collaboration and empower development. When an educator needs classroom culture tips or differentiation tools, we can recommend colleagues to visit. When an educator enjoys modeling strategies, we can invite them to plan a PD session or take on a leadership role. 

3. Creating time:

We encourage teachers to carve out observation time in two ways: Keep it simple, and enlist admin support. Our educators set big goals for themselves and their students. Peer observations should support their work, not add to it. We invite them to use drop-ins as a tool they can apply to anything, from a new problem to a long-term practice goal. When educators feel stuck, our teacher leaders encourage them to take 15-20 minutes out of a team meeting or a planning period, drop in on a colleague and renew their inspiration. When schedule conflicts keep teachers out of classrooms they want to visit, our coaches and admin team get together and provide coverage. 

When educators can benefit from visiting colleagues in another school, we make that happen as well. Specialists, including, art, music, PE, library, gifted, ESL and SPED teachers, for example, often don’t have counterparts on campus. Just by asking a fellow leader to facilitate a cross-building observation, we have been able to create a tailored growth experience for all teachers – and keep them feeling inspired and connected to peers. 

We leaders know that on tough days, it can be easy for teachers to feel pressured. For example this fall two of our teachers completed a training together. One felt some stress about implementing new strategies in class, so we suggested she drop in on her training partner. She saw that her colleague didn’t seem completely confident either – but the strategy was still working for the students. By encouraging educators to tap into team expertise, we can encourage growth and collaboration, not perfectionism. Every quick drop-in can make a big difference. 

As you look ahead to next fall, we hope you’ll consider adding a drop-in process to your instructional plans. And we hope one day you’ll reach out and tell us how it’s making a difference for your team, too.