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Leadership drop-ins into teacher classrooms are one of the most authentic ways to get insight into learning and teaching in your school.

They don’t need to be long - 5-10 minutes can be enough - but they offer a great way to bridge that gap between classroom practice and leadership knowledge.

But how do you ensure leaders are doing drop-ins and, if they are, how do you ensure they are delivering real impact for both leaders and teachers? This is where putting simple systems in place can make a huge difference.

1. Decide what you want

The first step is to establish what you want to find out from your drop-ins.

Creating a small number of statements aligned with your school’s definition of high-quality learning and teaching (I’ve never used more than eight) is a good way to ensure drop-ins can be used to spot key aspects of teaching and ensure a consistent set of insights.

For example, one statement might be “Students are actively engaged and show ownership of their learning”, then you could use a Likert scale - such as from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”, or from “not evident” to “highly evident”, or a simple 1-10 - to score each statement.

Digesting this through a simple online form or spreadsheet can help ensure leaders follow the same template, and you have a clear log of data to analyse.

2. How often?

Linked to this, you should also set targets for the frequency of drop-ins. You could set a blanket expectation of, say, three a week, but it’s worth being aware of people’s differing workloads.

For example, a leader with a 25 per cent teaching load may be asked to do more, while one with a 75 per cent teaching load does fewer.

Having forms and statements to grade against helps you set a clear expectation of accountability for leaders to do the drop-ins, too, so they don’t fall by the wayside.

3. Engage teachers

Next, clearly communicate to teachers the purpose of the drop-ins.

Make sure teachers feel comfortable and confident. Trust should continue to develop over time, as long as drop-ins are seen as predominantly positive feedback tools.

Try to avoid times that are particularly busy, such as concert preparation or the week before high-stakes tests.

4. Best practice

When going into the class, it’s important not to derail the lesson or make a big show. Just pop in, help at a station if needed, or sit quietly in the corner.

When you leave, send a brief positive comment to the teacher about what went well. For consistency, I use a three-line template that I adapt to be relevant for that lesson segment.

You’re not going to transform a teacher’s pedagogy in one drop-in, so don’t damage trust by sending them a long, critical message.

Then fill in the form - the sooner the better, to ensure you recall clearly what you thought. It’s best to trust your instinct on what rating to choose, rather than deliberating for a long time.

5. The action and impact

Once you have your data, this is where things start to matter. We analyse it at the end of each semester, asking:

• Did we live up to our drop-in goal?
• What areas of strength and development are common in our programme?
• Is there a teacher who could share excellent practice with our team?

Having established these points, you could:

• Develop your professional development goals.
• Inform your self-evaluation forms.
• Celebrate the successes with your team.
• Let parents know about key areas of strength in your programme.

6. Targeting drop-ins based on the data

A nice next step might involve focusing more deeply on a weaker area of learning and teaching.

If, for example, active learning is your weakest area, you could break this concept into its sub-components and develop the statements based on these.

We are an International Baccalaureate school, and have currently drilled into the explicit teaching of Approaches To Learning (ATLs) and the IB Learner Profile. The data coming in is already giving us some wonderful next steps in terms of professional development, and is informing our plans for the next academic year.

It’s also worth trying to identify teachers who score consistently highly in a particular area and might therefore be able to upskill the whole team. If there are no obvious candidates, it’s always fine to bring in external support.

Ultimately, drop-ins shouldn’t just make leaders visible; they should lead to better teaching over time. The difference is what you do with what you see.

Gregory Macur is EY and PYP principal at the Canadian International School of Hefei

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