How The Hewitt School Uses TORSH Talent for Instructional Rounds & Teacher Growth
In 2023, a team of academic leaders at The Hewitt School reimagined how educators engage in professional learning. Inspired by the framework of Instructional Rounds (City et al., 2016), the team adapted the model to better suit their community’s needs — trading hallway walkthroughs for video-based reflection and collaboration via the TORSH Talent platform.
The result? A sustainable system for peer feedback, growth, and connection that has transformed faculty culture.
Traditional Instructional Rounds
Traditional Instructional rounds are a four-step process:
- Identifying a problem of practice
- Observation
- Debrief/feedback
- Focus on the next level of work
Hewitt’s innovation was to blend these steps into a record-review-reflect loop that unfolds in monthly peer learning groups called pods.
Before Rounds
At Hewitt, a network of faculty (called pods), have met once a month from Sept–May for the past two years. Ahead of each gathering, a pod member records a piece of a lesson and frames a problem of practice for their fellow pod members to provide feedback on.
The problem of practice might be something like this: I teach a discussion-based classroom but find, via conversation mapping, that the same 1 or 2 students consistently do not participate. Please observe this lesson and offer feedback on participation overall and how I might better incorporate those students.
These recordings are uploaded to TORSH and pod members watch (usually before the gathering) and gather descriptive evidence related to the problem of practice. TORSH enables pod members to provide time-stamped feedback, and at Hewitt they specifically asked teachers to use timestamp commenting for naming observations but to refrain from feedback.
During Rounds
At Hewitt, pods meet in the classroom they have observed via video, this provides perspective and in a K–12 school, often provides our teachers with a new cross-divisional connection. Individual participants share their observations and wonderings with the whole group, building a body of evidence about what they saw going on in classrooms and how it seemed to bear on the problem of practice.
At Hewitt this time also often includes encouragement, naming the teacher’s strengths and practices others may be interested in.
In the debrief, participants work through a process of reflective questioning, prompting the teacher to think through their lesson and when appropriate, brainstorm changes or solutions to answer their problem of practice. Finally, the pod discusses the next level of work, recommendations for the teacher to make progress on their stated problem of practice. (City, et al., 2016)
Impact
Over the past two years, Hewitt has experienced measurable growth in its culture of feedback and collaboration, thanks to the implementation of TORSH-enabled instructional rounds.
Faculty now report substantial increases in both the frequency and quality of the feedback they receive, from peers and supervisors alike. Educators describe a shift from sporadic input to consistent, actionable feedback that supports professional reflection and instructional improvement.
This cultural evolution is reflected in the school’s 2024 YouthTruth Culture & Climate Survey, which shows a marked rise in positive responses across multiple indicators tied to feedback and collaboration. For example, a significantly higher proportion of teachers now say they receive regular input from colleagues and even affirm that this feedback helps them grow in their practice.
These shifts signal something deeper: a community where feedback is no longer episodic, but embedded in the rhythm of teaching and learning. Through TORSH Talent, Hewitt educators are now able to see each other in action, engage in focused dialogue around instructional practice, and grow together in meaningful ways.
“We believe that the process of instructional rounds via the TORSH platform has dramatically improved the culture of teaching and professional growth at Hewitt and we expect to continue to see growth in this area as we refine the process.”
— Daron Cyr, Director of Academic Engagement, The Hewitt School
Explore More
Learn how TORSH Talent supports collaborative professional learning through video, feedback, and growth tracking.