Every school leader knows the feeling. September arrives and you're energized — new year, fresh goals, a commitment to be in classrooms every week. By October, you've built momentum. Walkthroughs are happening, feedback is flowing, teachers are getting visited.
Then November hits. And December. And by February, that classroom observation practice you built in the fall has quietly disappeared.
We analyzed anonymized aggregate data from our observation platform covering more than 54,000 classroom observations across nearly 300 schools during the 2024–25 school year. The pattern was unmistakable — and more extreme than we expected.
The October Surge Is Real
One in four classroom observations happens in October.
That's not a rough estimate. In the 2024–25 data, October accounted for 26% of all observations — more than 14,000 out of 54,000. It's the single busiest month by a wide margin, nearly double the volume of any month outside of September.
The first quarter of the school year — August through October — accounts for 43% of the entire year's observations. Nearly half the year's classroom visits happen before Halloween.
This isn't inherently a problem. Fall is when routines are being established, when new teachers are finding their footing, when instructional patterns are taking shape. There are good reasons to be in classrooms early. The problem is what happens next.
Then the Drop-Off
November's observation count is less than half of October's. December drops further. By spring, the numbers are stark: April and May together account for less than 10% of the year's total observations.
It's not just that fewer observations happen. Fewer observers are active. In October, 836 distinct observers were conducting visits across our platform. By spring — February through April — more than 250 of those observers weren't active at all. They had stopped observing entirely.
Across all nearly 300 schools, only 28 observers sustained observation activity across ten or more months of the school year. Twenty-eight. Out of more than 1,100.
The October cliff isn't a gradual decline. It's a structural collapse. Schools build an observation practice in the fall, and the practice evaporates before spring.
Why It Happens
If you're a principal or AP who recognizes this pattern, you already know the answer. It's not a lack of commitment. It's a lack of time.
Research from Stanford and the Urban Institute shows that principals work an average of 58.3 hours per week but spend barely 10% of their day on instruction. A 2024 RAND study found that principal time devoted to instructional activities has declined steadily over the past decade. And an NAESP survey found that 67% of principals cite administrative burden as their primary reason for considering leaving the profession.
Fall is manageable because the year starts with a clean slate. There's energy, there's institutional momentum, and for many schools there's a compliance motivation — observation requirements that need to get checked off early. October is when that energy peaks.
But by November, the calendar fills. Discipline referrals increase. Parent conferences, IEP meetings, budget cycles, staffing decisions, state testing preparation, and a dozen other demands crowd out the time that was going to classroom visits. The observations don't stop because leaders stop caring. They stop because something else always feels more urgent.
The Cost of the Drop-Off
The spring observation gap matters because spring is exactly when teachers need support most.
Teacher exhaustion peaks between February and April. Classroom management challenges intensify. Student behavior shifts as testing season approaches. New teachers — 30% of whom leave their schools within a single year, according to a 2024 ERS report — are most vulnerable to burnout in the second half of the year, long after the initial orientation support has ended.
In the data, nearly 14% of all teachers — more than 1,100 across those 300 schools — received exactly one observation during the entire school year. One visit. One data point. For many of those teachers, the visit happened in the fall and no one came back.
A 2024 study in the Oxford Review of Education found that frequent classroom visits are among the strongest predictors of teacher retention. Not formal evaluations. Not high-stakes observations. Frequent, brief, supportive visits — the kind that signal "your administrator sees you and is paying attention."
When observations cluster in the fall and vanish in the spring, teachers get the opposite signal. They get visited when it's convenient for the schedule, not when they need it most. The observation practice becomes a fall ritual rather than a year-round relationship.
Coverage equity suffers too. In schools where observation activity drops sharply after October, some teachers get multiple visits while others get none. The difference isn't intentional — it's a byproduct of running out of time. The teachers who happen to be visited in October get feedback. The teachers whose turn was supposed to come in January or March don't. And nobody notices the gap until the end-of-year data shows it.
Spreading the Load
One pattern in the data stood out: schools that relied on a single observer were far more vulnerable to the drop-off. Across the dataset, 84 schools had only one person conducting all classroom observations. When that person gets pulled into meetings, testing coordination, or a disciplinary crisis, observations stop completely. There's no backup.
Schools with multiple observers — a principal and AP, instructional coaches, department heads — showed more consistent coverage across the year. Not because any single observer sustained a higher pace, but because when one person's schedule fills up, someone else can still get into classrooms. The observation practice doesn't depend on any single person's calendar.
There's also a calibration benefit. When multiple observers visit the same teachers, they bring different perspectives and catch different things. A principal might focus on classroom management. An instructional coach might notice questioning techniques. The teacher gets richer feedback, and the school builds a more complete picture of instruction.
This is one of the reasons pricing models matter. When observation software charges per user, adding a third or fourth observer means adding a third or fourth license fee. Schools that could benefit from distributing the observation load across more leaders are discouraged from doing so by the cost structure. Flat-rate pricing removes that barrier entirely — every administrator and coach can observe without anyone calculating whether the extra license is worth it.
What Sustained Practice Looks Like
The solution isn't simply more observations. It's more evenly distributed observations.
A school that does 200 observations — 150 in the fall and 50 in the spring — has a worse observation practice than a school that does 120 observations spread evenly across ten months. The first school has a burst of activity followed by a fade. The second school has a culture.
What the sustained schools in the data had in common wasn't volume. It was rhythm. Monthly targets. Multiple observers sharing the load. Brief walkthrough formats that take five minutes instead of a full period, making it possible to visit three classrooms in the time a formal observation takes for one. And visibility into who has been visited and who hasn't — so that coverage gaps don't quietly grow for months before anyone notices.
The research supports this approach. The Oxford Review of Education study found that it wasn't the depth or formality of individual observations that predicted teacher retention — it was the frequency and consistency of classroom presence. Teachers who experienced regular, low-stakes visits felt more supported and were more likely to stay, regardless of the observation format used.
None of this requires heroic effort. It requires intention and a system. A principal who visits two classrooms a day, four days a week, will observe every teacher in a 40-person building once a month. That's ten minutes a day. The constraint isn't time. It's that without a visible system — a list of who's been visited, a target for the month, a shared commitment among the leadership team — the intention fades as soon as the calendar fills up.
Don't Wait for October
The October cliff is real, but it's not inevitable. Schools that build observation practice around monthly rhythms, multiple observers, and simple formats can sustain classroom presence all year — including the spring months when teachers need it most.
Aprenta's Smart List automatically surfaces which teachers need a visit next, based on how long it's been since their last observation and how many visits they've received relative to their peers. Instead of relying on memory or a spreadsheet, you open the app and it tells you where to go. See pricing — flat-rate, unlimited observers, no per-user fees. Try Aprenta free and build an observation practice that lasts past October.