Creating an Observation as a Principal
This guide walks through what you can see and do in Swiftscore when you're signed in as a principal. Your view is automatically scoped to your own school — you'll only ever see your own teachers, and you can only create evaluations for people on your team.
Signing In
Go to the login page and sign in with your email and password. Swiftscore also supports signing in with Google or with Clever, if your district has either of those configured.
If your account is protected with two-step verification, you'll be prompted to confirm a code sent to your email before you're let in.
Once you're authenticated, Swiftscore checks your role and which school (or schools) you belong to. If you're a principal assigned to a single school, you're taken straight to your school's dashboard — no extra setup screen, no district-level landing page. You land exactly where your work is.
Your Dashboard
Your dashboard is scoped to your school. The teacher grid only lists teachers who belong to your school — teachers from other schools in your district never appear here, no matter how the page is sorted or filtered.
From the dashboard you can see:
- An overview of recent activity and observation trends for your school
- A grid of your teachers, each with a card you can click into
- Recent evaluations, so you can quickly jump back into something you started or review what was recently completed
If you ever try to navigate directly to a teacher who isn't part of your school, Swiftscore blocks the request — you won't be able to view their profile or data.
Creating an Observation
To start a new observation:
- Click Create from your dashboard.
- Choose the type of evaluation you're creating. For a quick, lighter-weight check-in, choose an informal observation.
- Pick the teacher you're observing. The picker only shows teachers from your own school — if you search for someone outside your school, no results will appear.
- Select a framework if your district requires one, then continue.
- Review the prep defaults for the observation and continue to the capture step.
Capturing Notes
In the capture step, type your observation notes into the Notes panel. Your notes are saved automatically as you type — watch for the autosave indicator to confirm your work has been saved before moving on.
Generating the Report
Once your notes are ready, click Generate. Swiftscore processes your notes and produces a structured evaluation report. This can take a little time to complete — when it's done, you'll be taken directly to the new evaluation's detail page.
Reviewing the Evaluation
The evaluation detail page is organized into tabs:
- Evidence — shows the notes you captured, exactly as you wrote them.
- Evaluation — shows the scored components generated from your notes. Informal observations may surface fewer scored components than a full formal evaluation, which is expected.
- Coaching — shows coaching guidance generated alongside the evaluation, to help inform your next conversation with the teacher.
After You're Done
Navigate back to your dashboard, and the evaluation you just created will appear in your school's recent evaluations, linked to the teacher you observed.
What Stays Out of View
As a principal, your access is intentionally limited to your own school:
- You only see teachers assigned to your school, never teachers from other schools in the district.
- You can only create and view evaluations for teachers within your school.
- Direct links to teachers or records outside your school are blocked.
This scoping is enforced everywhere in the product, not just on the dashboard, so what you see is always limited to the school you lead.