Observe Dashboard

The Observe Dashboard answers two questions on one screen: where do observations stand, and what is waiting on whom?

Use it for the weekly check: open it, see what has stalled, click through to the people involved, and close the loop.

Role: system administrators and organization administrators, on accounts with Observe enabled. District administrators see every school in the account; building administrators see their own.

Opening the dashboard

Go to Dashboards → Observe Dashboard in the sidebar.

If you have access to only one dashboard, it appears in the sidebar on its own rather than inside a Dashboards menu.

For a reminder of what any panel means without leaving the page, click How to use this dashboard, to the right of the page title.

The two rules that govern every panel

The filters drive everything. The date range and school filter at the top apply to every panel at once. There is no per-panel filter to keep in sync.

Dates bound completed work; unresolved work is shown as of today. An observation counts in the range it was carried out in. Anything still moving — a draft, a submitted observation waiting on a teacher — is always shown as it stands right now. A draft untouched since March is a problem today, not a problem in March, so narrowing the date range never hides it.

Every number opens its rows. Click a count, a bar, or a row and you get exactly the observations it counted. The number you click is the number of records you land on.

Filtering

Date range — defaults to the last 90 days. Presets cover This School Year, Last School Year, Fall, Spring, Summer, and All Time, plus a custom start and end date.

Schools — all schools you can see, or narrowed to specific buildings. Choosing a district-level organization includes the schools beneath it.

The panels

Observation summary

Five figures across the top of the page:

• In flight — submitted observations not yet closed, split by whose court they sit in.
• Observations — how many were carried out in the range, with the weekly pace beneath.
• Coverage — the share of observable staff seen at least once.
• Median time to close — how long an observation typically takes from visit to closure, with the previous period for comparison. This is the one figure counted by when it closed rather than when the visit happened, so that slow closures crossing the end of the range are not dropped from the calculation.
• Written feedback — the share of observations that carried a written remark.

In flight, Observations, and Coverage open their underlying lists.

Needs attention

The counts worth acting on. Up to five appear, and a count only shows when it can apply to your account — Waiting on a teacher needs a form set that asks for acknowledgment or reflection, and the last two need observable staff and observers in scope:

• Drafts never submitted — observations started and left open for more than 30 days.
• Stuck past 11 days — submitted work sitting in the same step for more than 11 days.
• Waiting on a teacher — observations where the next action belongs to the person observed.
• Teachers never observed — observable staff with no observation in the range.
• Observers who recorded nothing — observers who could observe and did not.

The coloured band on the left says whose court the work sits in:

• Blue — waiting on an observer
• Orange — waiting on a teacher
• Teal — a coverage gap

A count of zero stays on the list, shown quietly in grey, so you can see it is genuinely zero rather than missing.

Participation

How many of the observers who could observe actually did, the longest gap in the period, and the busiest day of the week.

Which teachers are being observed?

Distinct teachers seen, measured against everyone on the roster or observed during the period — so coverage cannot exceed 100%, even when someone observed has since left the roster.

The breakdown shows how many staff were seen exactly once, twice, three times, four or more times, and never. This is where repeat visits to the same few people become visible: a high coverage figure with most staff in the “seen four or more times” band means a smaller group is being seen often while others are missed.

Where observations land

The busiest grades and content areas by volume, up to eight of each. Click any row to open exactly the observations behind it.

A grade or content area with no observations in the range does not appear here at all — this panel shows where observations did land, not where they didn’t. To find who has been missed, use Teachers never observed in Needs attention, or the coverage panel.

Click Full breakdown by organization, grade, and content area to open the Organization Totals report with the same date range applied.

Observation volume

A bar per week, or per month when the range is long enough that weekly bars would be unreadable.

Weeks when the whole district went quiet are treated as breaks: shaded grey and left out of the pace figure, so a holiday never reads as a decline. One observer going quiet is not a break — that belongs in Needs attention.

Every bar with observations behind it opens the list for its period, as does every figure under Weekly figures as a table. Break weeks and weeks with nothing recorded aren’t clickable — there is nothing behind them to open.

Are observations substantive?

Not how many observations happened, but how much of each one reached the teacher:

• Included written feedback — a written remark was recorded.
• Acknowledged by teacher — the teacher confirmed they had seen it.
• Prompted a reflection — the teacher was asked to reflect and did.
• Tagged strengths / areas — feedback template tags were applied.

Each figure is out of every observation in the range, with the count it was measured from shown underneath. This matters: acknowledgment and reflection are only requested when a form set asks for them, so measuring only those observations would let a rollout covering twenty observations read as a district-wide success. Showing the count keeps the scale visible.

Where a feature is not in use at all — no form set requests acknowledgment, or no feedback templates exist — the figure reads — rather than 0%, so an unused feature is not reported as a failure.

A figure that is greater than zero but rounds below one percent shows as <1% rather than 0%.

Beneath the four figures, the panel splits the period’s observations into Walkthrough and Formal.

Reading the dashboard in practice

A typical weekly pass:

1. Scan the summary strip. Is the pace roughly where it should be? Is anything piling up in flight?
2. Work the Needs attention list. Click the largest count and act on the rows behind it.
3. Check coverage. If the percentage is healthy but the visit-frequency breakdown is lopsided, some staff are being seen repeatedly while others are missed.
4. Check the volume chart for gaps. A run of low weeks that isn’t shaded as a break is a real slowdown.

Common questions

A number on the dashboard doesn’t match a report.

Click the number. The list you land on is the same population the dashboard counted, with the same date range and schools applied. If a report shows something different, check whether the report is scoped to closed observations only, or evaluates roster membership differently.

Why does the current week look low in the pace figure?

It isn’t counted as a whole week. A week still in progress contributes only the days that have happened, so the pace figure doesn’t dip every Monday and recover by Friday.

Nothing appears in a panel.

A panel with nothing to show says so directly rather than leaving a blank space, so you know it looked and found nothing rather than failing to load.

I can see the dashboard but a colleague cannot.

Check their role. The dashboard is visible only to system administrators and organization administrators, on accounts with Observe enabled.

Related

• Observable Users Totals — coverage by organization, with a per-user breakdown.
• Observer Activity — one row per observer, worst first.
• Organization Totals — activity by organization, grade level, and content area.