Many educators learn by seeing the actions and thinking of others and many educators describe time as the biggest barrier to realising this learning opportunity.
Glide in stage left, Ghost Walks.
Ghost Walks involve visiting learning spaces when the students are not there. The focus of the visit is on the physical environment and artefacts of learning, such as displays and student documentation, rather than teaching in action. The main objective is to foster dialogue and reflection about what can be seen and also ‘cheat and steal ideas’ from others.
Why Ghost Walks (GW)?
GW are trust building: GWs have the potential to be non-threatening and non-intrusive and a starting point for future peer observations. When designing your GW, think about the messages that will be important for participants to receive such as the focus and what will be done with the information collected. Some schools choose to start GWs in learning areas/classes volunteered by educators a.k.a. volunteer-tional (we may have made that word up). How these volunteers experience the GW, and how participants see the GW play out, are vital steps in scaling this professional learning experience.
GW focus on the physical environment and artefacts of learning: GWs provide a process for an in-depth analysis of the physical aspects of a classroom, such as displays and organisation, as well as artefacts of learning such as anchor charts, scaffolds and student ‘work’. It is an opportunity to see what is in a colleague’s space and how they are communicating and capturing the intended area of focus for teaching and learning.
GW prioritise learning from others: GW design and implementation should encourage collaboration and knowledge-sharing among participants. The clarity of the focus for the walk, recording routines and structures and processes that follow these observations aim to generate innovative ideas and best practices for learning area design and artefact creation. Cheat and steal people, cheat and steal!
GW can result in on-going collegial learning: Providing time for the GW is one thing. Keeping your ear to the ground about on-going learning that happens outside of the GW is another. Leaders who have implemented GWs describe conversations in the staff room, sharing of resources, extra visits to classes and requests for observing others as increasing after a GW. One school includes a check-in at the start of PLC time the week after the GW. The agenda includes the prompt, ‘What is something from the Ghost Walk that you have acted on or thought about since?’.
When?
Obviously when the students are not present. Some schools we work with use staff meeting time or part of a student free day. One school has made Week 4 of every term Ghost Walk Week staff meeting.
How do you carry out a Ghost Walk?
5 components to consider.
Preparation & Process: Give those who are having their spaces visited the date of the visit, what the participants/visitors will be looking out for, how the information will be collated and used and how this will contribute to their professional learning. Encourage spaces to have examples deliberately made visible including student journals/workbooks or digital tools open and accessible.
Clarity & Focus: Whatever the focus and however it is communicated, everyone participating in the GW should know it. Whilst Step 2, you want to ensure this is in place as part of the preparation. The focus of GW’s can be dispositions, capabilities, whole school strategic focus areas, high-impact strategies, school culture and vision etc… The focus can be co-constructed with staff overtime, be communicated as a checklist or continuum, be continuously constructed as participants explore research and examples of practice, or any other way you communicate what it will look like when you have achieved the focus area.
Grouping and Timing: Some schools have PLCs carry out the GW to support post-discussions whilst others create random groupings for cross-pollination. You decide what works best with your structures and purpose. School’s who have tried GWs say that 3 to 4 learning spaces is the maximum you would want to visit with approximately 6-10 minutes per space. One secondary school made the deliberate decision to have all learning area educators visit like-learning area spaces, i.e., science visit science spaces, whilst another deliberately set up a learning area team visiting various learning areas, i.e. science faculty visiting history, food tech and maths.
Recording and Documenting: Consider the purpose of the recording and documenting.
Do you want to help people who did not visit the space ‘see’? Maybe choose photographs in a shared online space, like Padlet or Google slides.
Do you want to be able to capture patterns in practice to celebrate and action? Maybe try written notes in a shared space.
Do you want individual educators to receive feedback about their space? Glow and Grow or WWL and WWW (what we liked and what we wonder) comments left in the learning space.
Do you want to build a bank of current and potential practices? Maybe make note of what you see and what you don’t yet see.
Whatever the way you record and document, ensure it is set up with clear guidelines and connection to the focus area.
Reflection and Action: Plan for a reflection on what has been seen and the learning that has occurred. This might take the form of thinking routines, such as Connect-Extend-Challenge, Affinity Mapping to find themes, a personal reflection and action plan, or some other process you have for celebrating and actioning what is happening in your school. Recently, a school provided time for a Q&A of the classes visited to support the opportunity for participants to ask questions. They set this up as group ‘speed dating’ with 2 minutes to prepare questions and 2 minutes to ask them to the educators whose classes they visited. The group rounded out sharing an idea they would ‘cheat and steal’ from that educator's practice.
Below are some examples from schools. What do you notice about how they have applied these five components?
Idea 1: What does curiosity look like in our learning spaces?
Step 1: Brainstorm around the question "What should an ideal learning space that supports the disposition of curiosity look like?". Staff have access to current research to support this initial brainstorm. See Figure 1.
Figure 1
Step 2: After brainstorming the evidence that the faculties would expect to see, collate this information. See Figure 2.
Figure 2
Step 3: Three weeks later.
All participants have a mini-session on making observations, not evaluations, including examples, sentence frames and generating a list of possible evidence aligned with the initial brainstorm.
All classes are visited in cross-faculty teams.
Teams document what they see and what they do not yet see which supports the disposition of curiosity. See Figure 3.
Figure 3
Step 4: Debrief and Action
All teams come to a shared meeting area to share WHAT they saw and didn't see. Keep to the facts.
All teams discuss SO WHAT by comparing WHAT they observed and the brainstormed list generated before the Ghost Walk. Question prompts include, How do our observations relate to what we said should be evidence? So what does this mean? What are the implications of these observations?
NOW WHAT. In light of what was observed and what this implies about our learning spaces, what do we do now? What will you do now? What insights did you gain about your practice through this activity? How can you apply what you learned in the process to your own practice?
Step 5:
Collate the research, criteria and forms of evidence
Add photos to a live document
Add prompt to faculty meeting agendas to share actions taken
Idea 2: High Impact Strategy Implementation
This excerpt comes from a school implementation plan.
Week 2:
Co-constructed criteria - ‘What are we looking for?’ (all staff at staff meeting)
Teachers volunteer their classroom / learning space
Week 6:
Carry out walk during staff meeting time in mixed PLC groups (30 mins including debrief)
Each group of staff to visit two classrooms
Teachers ensure access to student books, displays etc... to support observations.
Week 7:
PLC agenda includes focus on learning from Ghost Walk Learning
Recording:
Add evidence to the Google Doc. Completed comments in Figures 4, 5 and 6 below.
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Some of the staff comments:
I had not thought of putting student names on the BIU walls. Great idea!
Love the idea of the Big Book as a way of recording and to refer back to.
I want to get more student writing into my displays and WAGOLLS. Thanks for the idea. I’m stealing it!
I need to get my students using the rubric more.
Can we have a chat about how you get your students to set their editing goals please?
Figure 7 is a summary collated by leaders and shared as part of PLC discussion.
Idea 3:
Case Study: Trinity Gardens - What is there in your school that is evidence of learner agency?
As part of a whole school Ghost Walk, teachers visited classrooms and took photos to capture implementation of learning strategies. Over 300 photos were added to Padlet.
Read about Trinity Gardens School Ghost Walk using photographs here
Other Ideas:
Ghost Walk in another school - https://www.clee.org/resources/collaborative-ghost-walk/
Supporting evidence gathering rather than evaluation - https://www.schoolreforminitiative.org/download/ghost-visit/?wpdmdl=12499&refresh=670626bbe6d581728456379
How are you implementing Ghost Walks? We would love to hear what is working for you and what you have learned.
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