The Birth of the eWalkThrough (eWT) Tool

Guido van Nispen on Flickr “R0011198”

About seven years ago, a handful of team members joined me at a training on classroom observations.  Day one of the training covered the research and background of the observation process.  In the morning on day two, we actually went into classrooms to apply the paper tool we had in our hands.   The afternoon of day 2 was spent then manually calculating all of our results to get data from the observations we had conducted. 

As I was sitting there that afternoon and looking around the room at the brilliant, highly educated people involved in this mundane process, I thought “there has to be a better way…this is such a waste of their time”.  So on the drive home, the eWT idea came into fruition as my team and I began to visualize and create what an electronic observation tool would look like.  We identified the problems with the process on which we had just been trained that day!  For example:

• No feedback was provided to teachers.
  
• The raw data from each observation had to be hand calculated.
  
• There was no archiving of the data for later access or dis-aggregation to drive decisions.
  
• There was no ability to customize the observation tool.  The tool was created by the presenters and the participating districts were expected to use the contents as presented.  For example, if a district was undertaking a specific instructional initiative, in this case let’s use Thinking Maps, there was not a way to gather data around that topic.
  
• Users could not easily ascertain how many observations they had completed on a teacher and when those observations occurred.
  

Our list went on and on regarding how we might design and program a system that would provide administrators and TEACHERS a more efficient and effective process that could drive decisions and ultimately, instructional improvement.  SWPRSC immediately began to work with a programmer on the basic ideas and piloted the process with two school districts that very first year!