{"id":3686,"date":"2013-11-22T02:23:49","date_gmt":"2013-11-22T02:23:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/?p=3686"},"modified":"2013-11-22T02:23:54","modified_gmt":"2013-11-22T02:23:54","slug":"the-observation-issue-kevin-stein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/2013\/11\/22\/the-observation-issue-kevin-stein\/","title":{"rendered":"The Observation Issue – Kevin Stein"},"content":{"rendered":"

Watch Me, Watch me \u00a0–\u00a0 Kevin Stein<\/h2>\n

\"Kevin
\nI\u2019m not sure how most people feel about observation.\u00a0 But I\u2019m curious to find out, so if you have a minute, please take this short survey on how you would rank \u201clesson observations\u201d in relation to things like \u201csleeping in on Sunday morning\u201d and \u201cgoing to the dentist.\u201d<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.surveymonkey.com\/s\/HHFYBYS<\/a><\/p>\n

Even before the survey results come in, I\u2019m guessing that lesson observations, even peer lesson observations, are not going to be super popular.\u00a0 Which, when I think about my daughter, seems pretty odd.<\/p>\n

You see, my daughter is 6 years old.\u00a0 Her three favourite things in the world are running as fast as she can, practicing gymnastics, and playing piano.\u00a0 If I or my wife are around, my daughter invariably calls out, \u201cWatch this,\u201d before she cartwheels across the living room, taps out a song on the piano, or sprints up the street.\u00a0 When I compare my daughter\u2019s boundless desire to be observed with my own feelings about classroom observation, I can\u2019t help but feel that, as a teacher, I have misplaced something important, something joyful.<\/p>\n

What is it about the way I watch my daughter as compared to how classroom observations are conducted, which has created this psychic gap?<\/p>\n

When my daughter is running up and down the street, she will often ask me to use a stopwatch to time her.\u00a0 I use the lap function to keep track of how long it takes her to run the first third, the middle third, and the last third of the distance.\u00a0 Sometimes I ask her \u201cwhen were you running fastest, at the beginning, the middle or the end?\u201d\u00a0 Sometimes she asks me.\u00a0 But I rarely, if ever say things like, \u201cThat was a very interesting sprint,\u201d or \u201cI don\u2019t think the pacing of your run was very even.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cBeyond Rashomon<\/i>,\u201d John Fanselow (1977, p.27-28) points out that the words teachers use when observing and commenting on each others lessons\u2014words like \u2018meaningful\u2019 and \u2018interesting\u2019\u2014often \u201chave good and bad connotations\u2026are in themselves judgmental as well as descriptive.\u00a0 Judgment means someone\u2019s ego is involved, and this can interfere with perception.\u201d\u00a0 Like keeping track of a runners time, collecting hard data during an observation and sharing that data during post-observation follow up can help keep the focus away from the kind of purely personal evaluations which so often land on our ears with the slap of disapproval.\u00a0 In some of my favourite observations, my fellow teachers have: used a stop-watch to keep track of how long each activity lasted; categorised the types of teacher talk I used; counted the number of words each student said during a class; and even made a map of where I was standing in the room during each activity and what materials I used at each location.\u00a0 In each an every case, I was given another piece of data to more fully see what was happening in my class without the sense that I was being inherently judged.<\/p>\n

After my daughter\u2019s piano lessons, the teacher will usually tell us one aspect of her playing that she would like us to focus on during the week.\u00a0 Sometimes it is paying more attention to rhythm.\u00a0 Sometimes is varying the intensity and duration of the notes played.\u00a0 We all know just what and why we are going to pay attention to during piano practice over the course of the week.\u00a0 In a similar vein, Jack Richards (1995) suggests that during peer observations, the observee give the observer a task which entails focusing on a particular aspect of the lesson and only collecting relevant data.\u00a0 Tasks can include measuring time on task, notating types of student responses to questions, or identifying classroom management techniques used during a lesson.<\/p>\n

In any classroom, so much is going on at any one time that, if we try to observe the class as a whole, there\u2019s a very good chance we won\u2019t notice very much of anything.\u00a0 In addition, at least for me, knowing the focus of the observation ahead of time means I can let go of one specific worry while I teach, allowing me a little bit more psychological breathing room so that I can attend to things I might normally miss as I teach.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to sound like I\u2019m bragging, but my daughter can stand on her hands, fall into a back bend, and then scramble around the room like a crab.\u00a0 Still, until last week, she couldn\u2019t do a somersault.\u00a0 Every time she tried, she would land with a thud on her back.\u00a0 I took a few videos just before she started to tumble over.\u00a0 It turned out that the moment before she fell forward, she kicked off and that extra burst of momentum propelled her over just fast enough that she had no time to curl her back.\u00a0 Hence the thud.\u00a0 After watching the video and talking with me about the other things she could already do, she bent down, slowly walked herself into a ball, curled herself over and rolled across the carpet.<\/p>\n

Peter Maingay (1988, p. 119-129) says, \u201cMuch of what a teacher does in a language-teaching classroom is ritual behaviour rather than principled behaviour.\u00a0 The most important role of an observer in most, if not all, observations is that of making teachers think about what they do: of drawing their attentions to the principles behind the rituals, of leading them away from ritual behaviour towards principled behaviour.\u201d So observation is not just about presenting data, it\u2019s about creating a space where a teacher can revisit what they already know about teaching and compare that knowledge with what is happening in the classroom.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, after observing my lesson one of my co-workers pointed out that a vast majority of the language students were using in class was memorised content from a worksheet.\u00a0 That gave me a chance to think about the role of creative language in my classroom and the types of speaking activities I was using.\u00a0 I realised that how I was teaching was disconnected from some of my deeply held beliefs about how languages are actually learned.\u00a0 And in that moment, I could see the right way to naturally lean forward and tumble back into the kind of teaching I wanted to be doing.<\/p>\n

John Fanselow (1988, p. 115) suggests that perhaps the goal of observation is not to, \u201chelp or evaluate,\u201d but instead to provide teachers with a chance for self-exploration.\u00a0 Which seems perfectly right to me.\u00a0 I found out early on in this dad-thing, that when my daughter said, \u201cWatch me,\u201d it was sometimes (but not always) a request to help her find a way to figure things out for herself.\u00a0 She was almost never happy to be told exactly what to do.\u00a0 In the same way, I have rarely finished a post-observation feedback session where I was given an armful of prescriptive suggestions and felt like I was walking away with anything other than a whole lot of unnecessary baggage.<\/p>\n

So whether it be peer or supervisory, I think keeping in mind some of the things that make a six year old happy when they are being watched, could go a long way to decreasing the anxiety and defusing the defensiveness that often colours our ideas of observation.<\/p>\n