In many school systems, teacher observations are stressful, high-stakes events that occur only a handful of times a year, and are often directly tied to the teacher's evaluation. At the charter network where I spent the last eight years, teacher observations are much different: rather than being the foundation of a teacher's evaluation, they provide many opportunities to give quick pieces of feedback, with the intent of improving instructional practice. Rather than being observed a few times a year, teachers are sometimes observed a few times a week. A system was needed that would work for all leadership teams at all schools in the network, that would help them to capture and deliver this feedback to teachers directly, while also logging the data in a place where school leadership teams could analyze how teachers were doing throughout the whole school.

I began working on this design after another developer and data wrangler created the initial version of the system. The initial version was a simple web form that loaded a number of pre-set variables based on the school; when a user (usually the principal or an instructional coach) would fill out the form, two things would happen: 1. an email would be sent directly to the teacher being observed with the content of the observation, and 2. the data would be logged into one main Google Sheet that captured all observation data for a given year.

With that foundation, this developer and I worked closely with the superintendent team and several principals at the network to push the tool to be more intuitive, and to do more. Using the principles that I had laid out in the organization's design language, we designed a series of tools that would allow the leadership team to dig through schoolwide trends. We also heavily modified the form, creating new ways for users to modify the options in the form directly, and implementing a way for historical data to appear whenever a user is filling out a new observation.

Initially this tool was scoped out for only one school, and was developed by one person in collaboration with the school's principal. Like many of the tools that I've worked on, I didn't create the vision from scratch: I collaborated with a number of individuals and teams to refine and improve upon the initial version that was created. Countless principals have given feedback on the tool over the 5+ years that it has been used. We worked closely with many people within the administration to come up with what is in use today.

Over the years, this tool has been an incredibly important part of the way that an entire network of schools develops their teachers professionally. To date, more than 20 leadership teams use this every day to observe their teachers and give feedback on their instructional practice.