D037 Practicum in Educational Leadership, Focus on Instruction and Operations, is catalog number EDUC 5299 and carries 3 competency units. It is the second half of the supervised leadership experience in a K-12 school and follows D036. D037 and EDUC 5299 name one requirement. Where the first half looked at how a leader conducts themselves, this half looks at what a leader does to instruction and to the machinery that supports it, which makes classroom observation and feedback the central craft.
The limits on this course, up front
This is a field placement, so the boundaries come first. We do not complete practicum hours. We do not contact your school, your site supervisor or anyone at your placement. We do not sign, prepare or handle placement or verification paperwork, and we do not fill in hour logs or activity records. We never write an entry for an experience you did not have. Portal credentials are never requested and never touched.
Inside those limits there is a great deal to coach, and it happens to be the part of the second practicum that most candidates find hardest: writing an observation that describes rather than judges, turning that description into feedback a teacher can act on, and reflecting on your own supervisory instincts honestly enough to improve them.
Instructional leadership is mostly noticing
The signature activity of this half of the practicum is watching instruction and doing something useful with what you saw. Candidates arrive expecting the difficulty to be in the feedback conversation. It is usually earlier than that, in the observation itself.
Untrained observers record impressions. The lesson was engaging. The teacher had good rapport. Students were on task. None of that can be discussed, because there is nothing in it a teacher could agree or disagree with. Trained observers record evidence: what the teacher said, what the students did, how many, for how long, and what the work on the page actually showed. Evidence is what makes a feedback conversation possible, because it moves the discussion from your opinion of a colleague to a shared record of a lesson.
The operations half of the course adds the supporting machinery: schedules, resources, interventions, data routines, the meetings that either move work forward or consume a Tuesday. Activities in this area might include participating in a data team, working on a section of the master schedule, sitting inside an intervention placement decision, or auditing how a resource is actually used against how it was budgeted.
Work here closes as Competent or Not Competent. There is no letter grade and no ordinary grade point average, and the 3 competency units describe the share of a six month term the course represents, while the placement itself runs on the school's calendar rather than yours.
Reading the aspects before the placement, not after
Scoring detail lives in your Course of Study rather than the public catalog. Open the rubric in the first week of the placement, because the aspects specify what evidence you need and evidence in a field course cannot be manufactured afterwards. Each aspect scores on its own and each has to reach a 2 for the task to pass.
The budget, worked. Assume six scored aspects and a submission near 2,200 words. Reserve 160 words for the setting and 140 for a close, leaving 1,900 of scored body, or 316 a piece at a flat split. Weight it: 460 to the feedback aspect, 420 to the observation evidence aspect, and 255 to each of the remaining four. That comes to 1,900, and it puts length in the two aspects that carry the course's identity.
Keep raw observation notes separate from the written analysis. Evaluators can tell when a description was reconstructed from a conclusion, and the giveaway is evidence that fits the judgment too neatly.
A shape for an observation and feedback cycle
Use your programme's template where one is supplied. Where the write-up is open, this cycle is the standard professional shape and maps cleanly onto instructional leadership aspects.
| Phase | What you produce | The discipline it requires |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-observation | The teacher's own focus question and what they want looked at | Their agenda comes before yours |
| Evidence capture | Time-stamped notes of speech, actions, counts and student work | No adjectives, no verdicts, no interpretation yet |
| Analysis | Patterns in the evidence, sorted into what happened and what it suggests | Every claim points back to a specific note |
| Feedback selection | The one or two things worth raising out of everything you saw | Restraint. A list of ten changes changes nothing |
| Conversation | How the feedback was framed, what the teacher said, what was agreed | Their thinking recorded, not just yours |
| Follow-through | What happens next, by when, and how either of you would know | A date, or the cycle ends in politeness |
| Self-reflection | What your own instincts got wrong and what you would do differently | Honesty about your part in how it went |
The feedback selection phase is where inexperienced supervisors do the most damage and lose the most marks. Everything you noticed is not feedback. Feedback is the smallest change that would make the biggest difference to student learning in that room, chosen deliberately and left alone until it lands.
Writing evidence that could survive being read aloud
A useful test for observation writing: could you read this sentence to the teacher without them disputing it. Evidence survives that test and judgment does not.
Compare the two registers. Students were disengaged is a verdict. Between 10:14 and 10:22, four of the twenty-six students had written nothing in their notebooks and two had their heads down is evidence. The teacher gave unclear directions is a verdict. The direction was given once, verbally, while students were moving between groups, and seven students asked a neighbour what to do within the next minute is evidence. The second version leads to a conversation. The first leads to a defence.
Counts do most of the work. How many students spoke, how many were called on, how long the question wait time ran, how many finished the task, how many of the sampled work products met the criterion. These numbers are small and easy to collect and they change a discussion completely, because they replace an argument about impressions with a shared observation about a lesson.
Confidentiality applies to all of it. Teachers and students appear by role in a submitted document, never by name, and no real evaluation record or personnel matter belongs in coursework. Describe the practice, not the person, and keep the school and district unidentified.
What separates Competent from a return
Aspects score independently, so returns here are usually about the quality of documentation rather than the placement itself. The recurring three are observation notes written as judgments, feedback that lists everything, and reflection that evaluates the teacher instead of the candidate.
- Observation evidence is descriptive, timed and countable wherever counting was possible.
- Feedback is limited to a small number of actionable moves, each tied to evidence.
- The teacher's own voice appears in the account of the conversation.
- Follow-through has a date and a way of knowing.
- The self-reflection is about the candidate's supervisory practice, since that is the person being assessed.
Performance assessment work at WGU can be revised and resubmitted with no grade penalty, so a returned write-up is recoverable. A missed observation window is not, which is why the aspects belong in your hands during week one. Where any part of your plan carries a proctored objective assessment, our line is unchanged: we prepare only, never sit or assist during an assessment, and never request or handle portal credentials.
Observation notes full of adjectives?
Send the D037 rubric and your own raw notes. You get an evidence-first rewrite model, a feedback selection method and honest coaching on the reflection layer.
Six mistakes that stall D037
- Observing with the rubric closed. If you do not know what evidence the aspect needs, you will collect the wrong things and discover it at the write-up.
- Recording impressions. Engaging, effective and rigorous are conclusions. They cannot be discussed and they cannot be scored as evidence.
- Giving all the feedback. Ten suggestions produce no change and signal that no judgment was applied.
- Leaving the teacher out of the record. A feedback conversation with only your words in it was a briefing, not a conversation.
- Choosing only easy classrooms. A practicum built from observations of strong teachers gives you nothing difficult to reflect on.
- Reflecting on the teacher rather than yourself. The candidate is the person being assessed, and the self-reflection aspect is watching for what you learned about your own supervisory instincts.
Three questions students send about D037
Is D037 the same course as EDUC 5299?
Can you write my observation write-ups or complete my hours?
How do I ask a colleague to let me observe them?
Where D037 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 1 current WGU program. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.