What you see on a walkthrough depends on which hat you have on that day
You can walk the same hallway every day and still miss what is happening in your classrooms.
Most of us learned walkthroughs from one angle. We walk in with a clipboard or a laptop, look for the objective on the board, check where the teacher is in the pacing guide, and write our notes. That angle matters. But when it is the only one you use, you start seeing what you expect to see instead of what is actually in the room.
When I walk a building, I have one of three hats on: my administrator hat, my parent hat, or my student hat. Each hat catches something the other two miss. Below are the questions I ask under each one, a simple calibration walk you can run with your team this month, and what to do with what you find.
Hat 1: The Administrator Hat
This is the hat most leaders already wear. It keeps you focused on the expectations your building agreed on. Its blind spot is that it turns into a checklist, and a classroom can check every box and still not be a place where students are learning much.
Questions to ask in the room:
- Did instruction start within the first few minutes, or are students waiting?
- Is the task aligned to the standard and the objective that is posted?
- Are the routines we agreed on as a building actually happening here?
- Is the teacher using the strategy we trained on in PD, or has it quietly dropped off?
