Why do classroom observations matter?

Good planning, effective classroom management, and a positive learning environment are all essential to support your students’ learning. Yet, these are difficult, if not impossible to realize without observing effectively how they are actually learning.

So, an effective teacher is a good observer because observations can :
• support you to know more about your students and build positive relationships with them;
• provide you with the necessary information to make wise instructional decisions to help them learn better;
• help you gather evidence about their progress towards meeting their needs and curriculum goals;
• make your students attentive, focused and so less inclined to misbehave, and more devoted to learning;
• add interest and excitement to your work. You get eager to find out about how they are learning, thereby enhancing your knowledge and experience of effective teaching practices.

How to ace classroom observations?

To help you make effective classroom observations, here are 4 essential tips to follow :

1. Start with a plan

Classroom observations should be direct, intentional, and systematic. To this end, you need to prepare for them by developing a plan in which you decide each of the following :
• Who will be observed (all students, just a group; those who are inattentive, struggling with a task, etc.)
• In what setting (reading group, writing workshop, learning centres, etc.)
• What behaviours will be noted (what you focus on).
• When and how long the observation will be.
• How the observation will be documented (anecdotal records, checklists, charts, interviews, and inventories).
• For what purpose the information will be used (the reason why you’re observing your students: to inform policy-making or personnel decisions).

2. Observe

After making your plan it’s time to start your classroom observations. Still, it’s important to understand that observing is not just a matter of seeing. However, it is a process of “selective watching” that involves also other senses to collect information such as hearing and smelling.

To this end, you need to be intentional about observing, watching, and listening to your students with curiosity. This is to get more insights into their learning.

Besides, it is essential to capture the events of the classroom as accurately and objectively as possible and not only to make a record of impressions.

So, your observations are descriptive accounts (the student refuses to work on the task) rather than interpretative (he is not interested) or evaluative (the task is not interesting).

What does this mean?

As you observe, notice details and avoid immediate interpretations. So, focus on the facts—what you see and hear, not a quickly formed impression.

Pay attention to your own experiences, beliefs, and opinions. Because these may affect your observations. Focus on what your students actually do and say,

This helps you learn more about them.

Even when you don’t understand your student’s behaviours (mainly in the case of children), keep an open mind. You can ask the student’s family member or seek a colleague’s help to figure it out.

Also, to make your observations a powerful teaching resource you need to observe your students over time. Repeated observations can provide you with evidence to evaluate them properly.

Observing students in different instructional settings is also necessary to learn about them.

For instance, to develop students’ reading fluency, teachers can observe them during read-aloud, shared reading experience time, guided reading, etc.

So, the more you observe, the more you can learn.

But, don’t forget!

Providing opportunities for students to voice their ideas and get more involved in learning can also help you collect more information, thus making your observations worthwhile.

3. Document your classroom observations

Recording what you observe provides evidence about how your students are learning. Indeed, by recording a student’s strengths and areas that need to develop, you’ll see patterns that help you plan instruction.

There are many ways to record your observations. Here are two examples of data recording methods :

1) Anecdotal records

These include a summary of an event and the date and time the event occurred.

Your anecdotal records can be recorded in several ways.

You can carry around sticky notes on a clipboard as these can be easily transferred to a notebook later. Or you can choose to use index cards that can later be dropped into the student’s folder.

Recording your classroom observations electronically using your smartphone or iPad is also another option for anecdotal records.

However, maintaining anecdotal record-keeping by observing students daily can be challenging for many teachers.

So, how can teachers deliver instruction, grab their students’ attention, listen to and observe them, and meanwhile keep those anecdotal records?

Organized observations of students and reflection are the two key components of anecdotal records. Therefore, besides focusing on what behaviours to observe, schedule when and how your anecdotal records are gathered.

This means you need to decide on the form of anecdotal record keeping, the way your observations are recorded, and when you should do it.

To make this job easier, use verbs with abbreviations as quick notations when conducting your observations. See the example below.

Verbs for Notating Anecdotal Records and Abbreviation Key Sample (Grant et al., 2010,p.276)

2) Checklists

A checklist includes preset categories (specific behaviours of students) that you’ll tally and/or rank during the course of the observation period. These forms help you record more focused and specific information. But, they don’t provide detailed information.

For instance, if you’re teaching children you can use a checklist that includes besides the student’s name, reading, and writing behaviours like enjoying listening to stories, choosing to read independently, enjoying writing stories, using capital letters correctly, beginning to use punctuation in writing, self-corrects most of the time.

To learn about what to include in a checklist, here is an example of Student Observation Checklist which you can download.

No matter what method you choose to document your observations be sure to get organized by creating a system that lets you review information as you plan and when you are preparing to talk with the student concerned and/or his parents.

Also, to make such a process more manageable you need to be a more intentional and focused observer. Because this makes you more interested in interacting with students and learning about them.

I know :

The process of observing and keeping records may seem challenging for you at first. Yet, don’t worry about observing the right way and finding the perfect way to record.

Instead, think of your observations as opportunities to find out about individual students and improve your teaching.

Yes! This requires time.

But, through trial and error and ongoing reflection, you can improve your observations and records, making relevant decisions on what works for you.

4. Reflect

This is the stage where you think about your observations and how you should respond to them. This reflection is critical as it helps you understand more what happened, how it happened, and why it happened.

How to do it?

Reflect immediately after a lesson so that you can organize your thoughts about it, gather any insights about events in the classroom, and note down any decisions you need to make.

While reflecting on your observations, think about the following questions :

• Did you accomplish the goals you had planned for this class/activity, etc?
• How were your students responding to this activity/lesson, etc?
• What worked well for them? What didn’t work well?
• If you could do this lesson/activity again tomorrow, what might you do differently?

To respond to your collected data, you may make decisions to change some tasks, introduce new ones, talk individually to a student, schedule a conference with parents, etc.

Whatever decisions you make, try to prioritize and remember that change or improvement does not come overnight.

It’s your concern and commitment to make from your classroom observations an effective teaching resource that matters most.

So, keep on learning and improving. My best wishes.