Free Tool · Observation Scheduling
Teacher Observation Schedule Builder
In August, most of us are staring at the same three things: a teacher roster, a district evaluation plan, and a calendar that starts filling up before October. Open houses, walkthrough expectations, early support meetings, fall testing windows, and the first round of parent concerns all show up before you have even had time to map who needs what. This free tool helps you turn that pile into a week-by-week observation schedule you can actually work from. Put in your teachers, your observers, your requirements, and the weeks you know are bad bets. The tool spreads the work across the year so you are not trying to finish half your formal observations in April. No signup, nothing stored, and nothing sent anywhere outside your browser.
Start with the school year you are planning, then build the schedule around the reality of your building.
School-year window
Requirements
Every district's plan differs — these are a starting point. Edit to match yours.
| Status | Formal | Walkthroughs | Complete by | Remove |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Observers
Teacher roster
Status choices stay aligned with the requirement table above.
Blackout weeks
Add any weeks that should stay free of observations.
Add at least one requirement, observer, and teacher to generate a schedule.
Everything runs in your browser. Your roster never leaves this page.
How the schedule is built
Most observation plans break down for ordinary reasons, not dramatic ones. A school starts with a reasonable target, then a few weeks disappear to assemblies, testing, student crises, weather, coverage needs, or the simple fact that you cannot be in three classrooms at once. By winter, the spreadsheet still says the year is on track, but your actual week says otherwise. The point of this builder is to start with the real window each teacher has, not the theoretical number of weeks on the calendar.
The tool looks at each teacher's requirement set and spreads those observations across that teacher's eligible weeks. If a teacher needs multiple walkthroughs and a formal, the schedule aims to place them across the year instead of bunching them together. If a group has to be complete by May instead of June, the tool shortens that planning window and works inside it. That matters because a nine-month school year is not really nine months of usable observation time once you subtract vacations, state testing, schoolwide events, and weeks when administrators are pulled in six directions.
It also respects the common sequence many of us want in practice: walkthroughs before formals when possible, especially for teachers who benefit from early low-stakes feedback. That ordering is not cosmetic. A quick classroom look in September or October gives you context before a formal cycle and often tells you where support is needed. When the tool can place walkthroughs ahead of a formal observation, it does. When the deadline window is tight, it still prioritizes completion over an ideal spacing pattern, because a perfect sequence on paper is not useful if it misses your district deadline.
The other thing it tries to avoid is the weekly pile-up that makes good observation work feel rushed. A fair plan is not just about total counts. It is about weekly load. If one week carries too many visits, post-conferences get delayed, write-ups get thin, and the feedback becomes more generic than it should be. So the builder balances assignments across weeks and across observers. If you add an assistant principal, dean, or other evaluator, the work can be shared. Where it can, the tool keeps a teacher's formal observations with one observer so the evidence base stays coherent rather than fragmented between multiple administrators.
Why front-load non-tenured observations
If your building has developing, provisional, or non-PTS educators, those observations should not sit in the same mental bucket as everyone else. They usually carry more required visits, and they often carry an earlier completion date. More important, they carry a different leadership obligation. Early evidence gives you time to coach. A first formal in October is useful because it creates room for a real growth conversation, a follow-up look, and an honest adjustment before spring. A first formal in May may satisfy the calendar, but it does not do much for practice. Front-loading does not mean flooding a new teacher with visits in the first month of school. It means getting the first meaningful cycle done early enough that the second half of the year can respond to what you saw. For principals, that usually leads to better support and fewer deadline scrambles. For teachers, it feels more credible because the evaluation process is happening alongside instruction, not landing at the end as a compliance exercise.
What this tool doesn't do
It plans weeks. It does not book calendar time slots, reserve coverage, or send invites. That is intentional. In most schools, the week-level plan is the part that gets neglected early, even though it is the backbone of the whole process. Once you know that a formal belongs in the week of October 14 or a walkthrough belongs before Thanksgiving break, the exact day and block can be handled inside your real calendar with actual school constraints in view.
It also does not know your contract's notice requirements, your district handbook, or the details of your CBA. If your local process requires a certain notice period, a pre-conference, a post-conference window, or restrictions on unannounced visits, you still have to apply those rules. The builder gives you a defensible draft of the year. It does not replace local judgment or local policy.
And it does not store anything. That means there is no roster sitting in an account and no schedule waiting for you next week. Export the CSV, print the table, or move the plan into whatever system you actually use to run the year. As the year moves, regenerate and adjust. Mid-year hires happen. Leaves happen. A clean October plan sometimes needs a January reset. That is normal.
A schedule is the easy half. The write-ups are the hard half.
Once the visits are on the calendar, you still have to capture evidence, write clear feedback, align it to your rubric, and keep the record organized across the year. That is where EduEval earns its keep.
More for school administrators
Observation schedule builder FAQ
Is my roster uploaded anywhere?
No. Everything runs in your browser; the roster never leaves the page and nothing is stored on a server.
Does it work for Danielson or Marzano cycles?
Yes — it schedules the observations (formal and walkthrough counts and deadlines) regardless of which rubric you score them against.
Can I split observations between me and my assistant principal?
Yes. Add each observer; the tool distributes the load and keeps a teacher's formal observations with one observer where it can.
What about mid-year hires?
Regenerate the schedule with a later start month for that teacher's window, or add them and set a tighter complete-by month.
Is it really free?
Yes, and there is no signup. When you want the observations themselves written up — the narrative, the evidence, the rubric alignment — that is what EduEval does.