Observation
Cambridge International Education Teaching and Learning Team
Being observed by colleagues will allow you to gain others’ perspectives into your practice and provide feedback and ideas on how to improve. Observing your colleagues can also provide new ideas and approaches which you can try in your own practice.
What are they?
Observations are when someone assesses your practice through watching it in action. These observations should have a very specific focus, for example the quality of questioning or the quality of student-led activities. This focus can then be specific, measured, reflected upon and revised to make sure your students make progress.
What happens?
Once you have set the specific focus or target area, a colleague will watch you deliver the lesson and give feedback on the strengths of your practice or some possible ideas for development. These observations could also be carried out over a block of lessons to show progression.
Table of contents
About reflective practice
Personal Reflections
Feedback from others
Observation
Learning in networks
Julie Tice, Teacher, Trainer, Writer, British Council Lisbon
Video or audio recordings of lessons can provide very useful information for reflection. You may do things in class you are not aware of or there may be things happening in the class that as the teacher you do not normally see.
- Audio recordings can be useful for considering aspects of teacher talk.
- How much do you talk?
- What about?
- Are instructions and explanations clear?
- How much time do you allocate to student talk?
- How do you respond to student talk?
- Video recordings can be useful in showing you aspects of your own behaviour.
- Where do you stand?
- Who do you speak to?
- How do you come across to the students?
Jim Knight
Bill Gates provoked an explosion of commentary when he suggested in his May 2013 TED Talk that a video camera should be in every teacher's classroom. Many people recognized that video cameras, if used effectively, could dramatically improve how teachers teach and how students learn. Others realized that if video cameras were used as tools for control, they could profoundly damage teacher morale and decrease the likelihood of any positive change occurring in schools. The truth is that both sides are right.
Julie Tice, Teacher, Trainer, Writer, British Council Lisbon
Invite a colleague to come into your class to collect information about your lesson. This may be with a simple observation task or through note taking. This will relate back to the area you have identified to reflect upon. For example, you might ask your colleague to focus on which students contribute most in the lesson, what different patterns of interaction occur or how you deal with errors.
Jennifer Gonzalez, Cult of Pedagogy
Because teaching is such a complex act, the variations in how we do it are endless. We discipline differently. We set up our space differently. We perform strategies in different ways. It’s highly likely that someone else in your building is better at something than you are. By watching the way our colleagues teach, we pick up tricks and techniques that we can take into our own rooms.
On the receiving end, there’s something really satisfying about having a peer notice something you’re doing right. In our work, we rarely get positive feedback on the things we try so hard to perfect. I have definitely never had a student approach me after class and say, “Girl, that anticipatory set was off the hook!” The teachers in my school asked, “Who am I to tell someone else what they’re doing wrong?” And here’s my answer: You are experts. You are experts because you have been there, tried that, had the same struggles. So many people don’t understand what it’s really like to be a teacher. But you do. That’s your expertise.
Emily Dolci Grimm, Trent Kaufman and Dave Doty
If your professional learning seems stalled, maybe you could put yourself and your colleagues in the driver's seat of professional development. The authors describe a professional learning approach that gives teachers both a say in what they focus their learning on and a chance to practice and refine teaching strategies that they hope to master—teacher driven observation. At the heart of this approach are teacher-peers observing lessons and objectively collecting data—through scripting, counting, or tracking methods. Using an extended example, Dolci Grimm and her coauthors show how a teacher would create a focus question she wants to learn about, engage peers in observing within her classroom to collect data centered on that important question, and debrief with the observation team in a way that uses that data to drive realization about where her teacher's practice needs to change.
RethinkingClassroomObservation.pdfA variety of approaches to teacher observation support professional growth and student achievement. The following are several of those methods:
Lesson Study -- In this three-pronged approach designed by Japanese educators, teachers collaboratively develop a lesson, observe it being taught to students, and then discuss and refine it.
Peer Coaching -- In this non-evaluative professional development strategy, educators work together to discuss and share teaching practices, observe each other's classrooms, provide mutual support, and, in the end, enhance teaching to enrich student learning.
Cognitive Coaching -- Teachers are taught specific skills that involve asking questions so that the teacher observed is given the opportunity to process learning associated with teaching the lesson.
Critical Friends Group (CFG) -- This program provides time and structure in a teacher's schedule for professional growth linked to student learning. Each CFG is composed of eight to 12 teachers and administrators, under the guidance of at least one coach, who meet regularly to develop collaborative skills, reflect on their teaching practices, and look at student work. [See an Education World article, Critical Friends Groups: Catalysts for School Change.]
Learning Walk -- The Learning Walk, created by the Institute for Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, is a process that invites participants to visit several classrooms to look at student work and classroom artifacts and to talk with students and teachers. Participants then review what they have learned in the classroom by making factual statements and posing questions about the observations. The end result is that teachers become more reflective about their teaching practices. Professional development is always linked to The Learning Walks.