Imagine being invited to your Auntie’s house for tea. She serves up the meal of chicken with a range of side dishes. You take a bite, chew, realise you are not keen on what you’ve tasted and so instantly start offering suggestions of how she should cook her chicken better.
Alternatively, imagine the same scenario but this time you love the taste. In fact, you think you know why the chicken tastes so good and so start to explain to her in detail (the person who cooked the meal in the first place) why her approach to marinating the meat has been so effective.
You just wouldn’t do either, would you? It would be rude to criticise her chicken when she’s been kind enough to cook it for you – indeed, what if the problem isn’t with the chicken at all, and your dislike is simply that she’s included an ingredient you’re not personally keen on? Even if we say, ‘Wow your chicken tastes really good because you marinated it first using cumin and paprika…’, we risk suggesting we have a greater authority than her to proclaim what makes good chicken.
Instead, if we enjoyed it, it would be much more appropriate to say, ‘Thank you for having me for tea. I enjoyed the meal, please could I have the recipe?’ If we were not so keen, we can still be grateful for the hospitality and simply say ‘Thank you for having me for tea”.
Why am I ranting about chicken?
Last year, I wrote about the idea that settling into a teaching practice placement is a bit like staying at your Auntie’s house. This sought to address some of the feelings beginning teachers can experience of being in, but not of, the school where they are on Teaching Practice. This year, as placements start, I want to return to that analogy to think about how beginning teachers observe experienced colleagues. It can be an aspect of early professional behaviour that is missed.
Getting observation right
At the start of placement, it is natural for beginning teachers to watch experienced teachers and form opinions about what they are seeing. After all, they are constantly encouraged to reflect, analyse and think critically. However, there is an important distinction between judging practice and learning from practice.
Being welcomed into a colleague’s classroom is a privilege. Whenever any teacher observe another, we occupy a luxurious position. We can focus on a handful of events, while the teacher is simultaneously making hundreds of decisions about behaviour, relationships, explanations, timing, resources and learning. We rarely have access to all the context that informs those decisions.
This means that even positive judgements can be problematic. Comments such as, “That was the best way I’ve seen worksheets handed out” may sound complimentary, but they still position the beginning teacher as someone evaluating a colleague’s expertise. Equally, suggestions about how something could have been done differently often overlook the information and experience that sit behind a teacher’s choices. Offering any kind of judgement from a position of inexperience is inappropriate and can have the (often) unintended consequence of rubbing new colleagues up the wrong way.
Cultivating a curiosity first approach to observation
A more productive approach is to cultivate curiosity.
Instead of asking:
“Wouldn’t it have been better to hand the worksheets out yourself?”
consider asking:
“I noticed you asked pupils to distribute the worksheets. I’m thinking about how I’ll manage transitions in my own lessons. Could you help me understand why you chose to do it that way?”
The difference is subtle but significant. The first question carries an implicit judgement. The second invites professional dialogue and develops a beginning teacher’s active noticing: paying close attention to classroom events and then seeking to understand the thinking behind them. Rather than deciding whether something was good or bad, we ask what problem the teacher was trying to solve, what alternatives might have existed, and what we can learn from the decision that was made.
Supporting begining teachers to observe well
So as beginning teachers start their new teaching practice placements, we need to support them to view every lesson as an opportunity for inquiry rather than evaluation. In doing so they will need to cultivate the qualities of generosity, curiosity and gratitude for the opportunity to learn from experienced colleagues.
After all, the goal of observation for beginning teachers is not to decide whether someone else’s teaching is effective. It is to deepen their understanding of how classrooms work and to think about what they might want to take forward into their own practice.
Becoming a History Teacher 