Reflection On Class Observation

University of Guanajuato
B.A. in TESOL
DICIS
Subject: EI-420 Class Observation
Professor: Hilda Karina Caselis Ramírez
By: Janette López Miranda
December 6, 2012
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Introduction
A teacher was just told that his language coordinator will observe his class the next day… He started sensing a mixture of feelings: dizziness, annoyance, fear, stress, among others.Why did he feel that way? The answer is because that particular observation session was not set properly… it was accorded out of the blue.
Performing an observation is not just watching carefully everything that happens in a class rather it must be a coordinated, planned, focused action which must benefit both the observer and the observed. I wish I knew all of this the first time I entered aclassroom to observe a fellow teacher seven years ago.
Within this paper, a self-reflection along with quotations of observation experts will be displayed, providing an overview of the most important aspects to take care of before, during, and after class observation.


Class observation, why and how?
Among occupations, teaching is one of the most demanding ones since it is human materialeducators work with; this is why constant renewal and improvement is necessary to ensure better service from teachers towards pupils. There are many ways to achieve the previous, but most likely “Observation plays a fundamental role in improving the quality of teaching and learning” (Watson-Davis, 2009).
Through observation, a language professor can benefit greatly; the bad thing is that, manytimes, it is not well welcomed because “until the 1990s, lesson observation was mainly confined to teacher training –the observer monitored, assessed and judged the trainee as part of the course” (Watson-Davis, 2009). In addition, later on, schools adopted observation as a manner to judge teachers’ teaching which brought as a result the fact that educators do not entirely approve it because offear, nervousness, or discontent.
Personally, I have to admit that I did not used to think well of class observation because of the previous experiences about it in my teaching. The first observation encounter I had consisted on going to the language school every afternoon, enter in the classroom, sit down somewhere, and just watch the entire fifty minutes of class. I saw many aspects I liked suchas teaching with games, nevertheless at times I felt like wasting my time since I never got any observation format I should follow, as a result I did not know what to focus on, I did not know if everything I saw was right or wrong… I just felt lost! As established by Wragg (1999) “One of the problems faced by… classroom observers is the matter of deciding what should be the focus of attention.So much happens in classrooms that any task or event could be the subject of pages of notes and hours of discussion” (Wragg, 1999). At another time, I noticed that observations were carried out just once a year (there was neither previous meetings nor follow ups) so that, in my opinion, gave as a result subjective (not entirely reliable) results; “an observer might make notes about an event andthen interview the participants afterwards, asking questions about who did what, and why” (Wragg, 1999).
After attending to purposeful format-based observations and after reading a lot about it, my previous perception changed completely; as it will be displayed in the following lines.
It has been well known that there are different approaches to trace what happens in a class such as:written manners, video recordings, and sound recordings; whichever of those is chosen, one must know the purpose of the observation so that the process is guided towards a particular objective, and that observation can be either “quantitative or qualitative” (Wragg, 1999), despite of whatever type of approach it is, they definitely complement each other in order to obtain the best picture possible of...