Visiting Other Teachers

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Home : 2002 : August : 12

Visiting Other Teachers
By Shannon

I would say that visiting another teacher's classroom is one of the best ways to get help, but, as your situation illustrates, not always a cure-all for all problems/needs. I think a lot of us have had the experience of
attending a training/inservice on some new program and thinking, "Well, that all sounds well and good, but does it actually work in a real-life classroom?" Visiting another teacher's classroom gives you the opportunity to find out the answer to this question. Or, if you're not there to learn some specific program/method, at least you can get some other ideas from that teacher on things

like bulletin boards or classroom management, which you may not have thought about on your own.

I also think that when I first started teaching, it was very useful to visit another teacher. Besides just getting some good ideas, I felt better when I saw that an experienced teacher was having some of the same problems I have. Too often we talk to people in the lounge who stretch the truth about how great things are going, or else neglect to mention when things went wrong in order to save face. You feel like that person must be the greatest teacher ever, and you wonder why things aren't going as well for you. By actually visiting, you realize that you aren't the only one who has problems or challenges. (And I realize that the actual purpose of visiting another class is not to discover shared problems, but it did make me feel better.)

That being said, I do feel that the benefits of visiting another class only go so far. My principal doesn't want to be bothered helping us with our problems, so he's obsessed with telling us to go learn by observing another teacher. He acts like you should be "magically cured" when you go for an hour to visit another teacher's class. In particular, he wanted me to visit this one teacher, who was a veteran teacher but also a close friend of his. While she's a great teacher and I respect her a lot, I found her sort of "hands-off" style of discipline didn't work for me. I wound up resenting my principal for wanting me to copy her style.

So, to sum up, I would say that visiting other teachers' classrooms is useful, but you must remember that what you learn may only be one piece of the puzzle. You need to add in information and ideas you get from other places, and adjust to your own style, in order to really grow and change.