Achieve a greater level of credibility with multiple observers. Nautilus is designed to be highly collaborative, simple and insightful. Create flexible, real-time, lesson observations with your colleagues, external partners, governors or school leaders.
View all of your recorded feedback from your most recent observations or from all of your judgments over time. Your dashboard will present your specific areas for improvement as well as critical opportunities for supportive, individual teacher or department feedback.
Our learning walks, book studies and observations are designed to carefully guide observers, focusing on accurate evaluations and meaningful feedback. We don't use a checklist of teacher standards and you can even switch the Ofsted judgements off.
Pupil book scrutinies can easily be time consuming and can lack focus and detail. Our book study frameworks provide an efficient, consistent and accurate system of evaluation. With same-day reports that reduce workload and increase impact.
Our surveys contain 10 simple questions to allow you to consult with your children and families. Generate a simple link to send them and then see your outcomes appear on your dashboard. Edit or change your questions to suit you in our 'Builder'.
You will have no doubt worked hard to develop your curriculum. Now you can capture what you do while you observe. Take photo's of great work, classrooms and learning. Tag them with key words and commentary. View and present in the Gallery.
The validity of your observation process depends on how well your evidence is collated and articulated. Our simple and downloadable PDF reports collect, triangulate and present all of your feedback for a range of purposes - making teacher feedback, school improvement planning and accountability meetings more effective.
Remove one-time lesson observations recording lessons that may not be indicative of your teachers true capabilities, and replace them with a system that provides a more stable picture of a teacher's practice or a subject area. Observe more accurately, any aspect, lesson or teacher at any time by simply re-visiting or pausing your visits.
You can either edit our framework descriptors, or you can create your own in minutes with our Builder. This feature will enable you to write your own bespoke learning walks, observations, book studies or surveys. Perfect for focusing on those critical areas of your choice.
The Nautilus school improvement tool is a very simple, high impact, online product that has been designed to support school leaders with the process of assessing and improving, all aspects of school provision.
Your provision is a daily hive of activity. It can be easy for school leaders to end up shackled to their desks, stuck in stand-alone evaluation cycles and paperwork exercises, offering limited scope for sustained improvement.
Whilst many schools will apply stand-alone lesson observations, we believe that when we add meaningful and focused learning walks, drop-in observations and book studies, we can acquire a much more insightful view of everyday provision. This means that precious time collaborating with learning partners, leaders and colleagues can be spent using Nautilus to observe and discover together.
'This product has been specifically designed to promote collaboration, either between school professionals or external partners, adding credibility to the observation process.'
With our online observation frameworks, observation snap shots can be made more quickly and more often by using a tablet or ipad, creating a realistic overview of your school provision. You can choose to focus on a subject, department or all teaching and learning. Nautilus will serve to enable Headteachers to build an accurate school profile within the short and long term, with each observation adding further insight for improvement.
The Headteacher begins by logging into their personalised dashboard. From this area the date and focus of each learning observation can be set, before sending invites to the participants or creating a simple 'click and go' method. Learning walks can also remain 'open' for daily learning walks.
'Once the observation has been created, each participant ventures into the corridors and classrooms to record their observations using a tablet, laptop or even a smartphone.'
By using one of our expertly designed observation frameworks, contributors will be able to focus on the significant, agreed descriptors - avoiding the prospect missing the core aspects of learning. As the participants input their thoughts and views, a live profile will be building in the background, ready for the Headteacher to view on their dashboard. This data will highlight each acknowledged strength, as well as each area for improvement, offering observers the chance to input their personal views. We can also use Nautilus for book studies, creating high-impact staff meetings with any number of staff creating insightful and thorough reports in minimal time. You can even offer your governors the chance to participate by acquiring parent or pupil views during parent's evenings.
'A series of simple charts and statistics will also present each contributors views, with each member of staff or lesson observed – perfect for quick, significant feedback.'
We all know that schools are explicitly accountable to a number of stakeholders and third parties. Your Nautilus reports will serve to articulate both how you effectively acquire your self-assessment as well as your outcomes and actions.
'Your reports can be used for simple handover documents for inspection purposes, or as electronic reports to present to governing bodies and staff.'
Strengthen and Improve Your Self-Evaluation. Many schools still rely on paper-based observation processes that can rely on stand-alone observations and appraisal cycles. These approaches can be time-consuming, inconsistent and often requiring expensive cover costs. More often than not they will be limited to individual school leaders. Nautilus can create stand-alone observations, but it can also do much more.
'Knowing your strengths and areas for improvement is the most important aspect of a Headteacher's role. Your time is precious and you need to make sure that you have the right insight to make the right daily decisions.'
Adds Nautilus to their existing strategies. Carefully gathers information across the school year, ensuring accuracy and validity. Works flexibly, respectfully and informally - capturing the natural 'flow' of the school day. All staff and other partners are involved in this process. This means that they know that the school is focused on development, rather than 'performance'. This creates trust and intent.
Uses this information to give individual clear, timely and valid feedback and improvement points, as well as being able to evaluate all of the collective aspects of provision across the school, on any given day.
Is in a better position to confidently deploy the right critical actions and strategies for school improvement.
Teachers and leaders grow.
Observes teachers on a performance related appraisal cycle with lengthy and very occasional lesson observations. Teachers can feel burdened by them and they may not reflect daily teaching. This means that the feedback can be less meaningful. Also involves lengthy reports, concluding with two points for feedback.
Strategic improvement plans are generally written reactively from summative data. They may not inform improvement because they do not reflect individual teacher skill-sets. Instead, they reflect how well the have children learned. The school's self-evaluation may be accurate, however, any chosen improvement strategies may not impact. A lot of staff time and effort is dedicated to an approach with clear limitations.
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