TIM Tools 7.5 Administration Guide

TIM-O: Question-Based Method

<<< See “TIM-O: Beginning an Observation” for the introduction to this tutorial.

To create a TIM lesson profile using the question-based method, check the top radio button for Question-based.

Select the school where you will be doing the observation. The dropdown Select School menu will present you with a list of all schools where you have been assigned as an observer.

Next, select the teacher’s name from the Select Teacher dropdown list. This list will be populated with every teacher at the selected school who has been entered into the TIM system.

Always keep in mind that the unit of observation in the TIM-O is the lesson, not the teacher. You are selecting the name of the teacher whose lesson your are about to observe.

Figure 1. Selecting the teacher to observe after the school selection has been made.

When you have made your selections for method, school, and teacher, click the Begin an Observation button.

This will begin a series of questions, each of which asks about a clearly observable activity in the classroom. This method will very quickly converge on a profile for the lesson, so you can take your time at the beginning of the observation before diving in. We recommend observing the lesson for at least five or ten minutes before you begin answering questions. Since each question after the first depends on your answer to the previous question, it’s not possible to go backwards a step in the series of questions. Therefore it’s best to take your time to observe carefully at the beginning.

Figure 2. The first question.

The first question will always be, “Is technology being used in the lesson/activity?” If you answer “No” there will be nothing else to observe and the system will immediately take you to the summary screen.

Hopefully, your answer to the first question will be “Yes.” In that case, you will be presented with a second question which is always, “Are the students directly using technology?”

Figure 3. The second question.

If most of your teachers are at the lower end of the TIM, you will see very similar questions each time you do an observation and you will often be able to get to a final profile in as few as five or six questions. The system asks only the bare minimum number of questions necessary to determine which of the 3,125 possible TIM profiles best matches the observed lesson.

As you begin to observe lessons at higher levels of technology integration, you will see an increasing variety of follow-up questions, but very rarely will it require more than a dozen questions to determine a profile.

When the system has asked enough questions to determine a profile, it will automatically send you to the Lesson Summary Indicators page. Here you will see a lesson profile based on the answers to your questions.

Figure 4. A Lesson Summary Indicators page showing the resulting TIM profile from one lesson observation.

From this point forward, the process is the same to complete an observation using either the question-based or matrix-based method.

Tutorial continues with the page, “TIM-O: Finishing an Observation” >>>