The last few years have seen even more pressure on the teaching workforce due to covid, remote learning, and other accountability measures.
Many of our customers fed back that the term "observations" is no longer fit for purpose and still conjures up feelings associated with a formal lesson observation and staff being monitored with a clipboard.
This was also true of the individual judgements that made up an observation record. The term 'judgement' was a more fixed term linked to observations, whereas forms are becoming more about feedback and can contain a range of different criteria.
Many schools are changing the way they approach performance management. Dropping in to spend time in a classroom but allowing the conversation or feedback afterwards to have more of a coaching focus.
Questions like "What went well in that session?" coupled with "Are there any areas you feel you could have improved on?" and "Is there any training you feel you need to help you improve in this area?" make this process more of a two-way conversation and allow for open dialogue.
Perspective Changes
Perspective has always allowed you to create any type of template. For example, a learning walk, book or work scrutiny, activity observation as well as a lesson observation.
When we surveyed our users, we realised we needed to change the word 'observations' to something that reflected all the types of observation you can carry out in Perspective. Several suggestions were made, including Mentoring Record, Practice Development, Effective Feedback and Development Record. Based on the votes from our users, we have decided to move from using the term 'Observations' to 'Development Feedback.'
This change took place on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2022.
The main thing you will notice is the changes to the menu bar - the screenshot below shows the menu as it stands before the changes.
This whole menu has now been replaced by a new landing page for all things related to Performance Management. From here, you will still be able to do all the same things you did before (according to your user permissions), but it will also pave the way for some exciting new features coming to this whole area in 2023, including an enhanced CPD module.
You'll also notice that where we used to refer to the text or graded questions on observation records as 'Judgements', these are now referred to as Statements, which make up a template/record's Content.
The below screenshot shows the old terminology on a feedback record.
Now, we refer to those as text/grade statements, as shown below.
We are also excited to update our bank of Development Feedback, and Professional Standard templates with several new frameworks such as NGA skills audits, website audits, Ofsted readiness checklists and many more.
If you have any templates not set up in Perspective, check out this helpful guide. You can always get in touch with us at perspectivesupport@angelsolutions.co.uk if you need assistance with that; our Support Team can also help you promote templates across all schools in the MAT.
If you know of any other national framework or template that would make a useful addition to our library of templates, please let us know.
If you have any questions about any of the language changes above or have any other feedback on how we can continue to make Performance Management work best for you, please let us know via our feedback form.