The latest IH Journal has just been published, featuring the Developing Teachers column by yours truly. This time the topic is observations.
The journal features articles by IH staff from around the world, covering topics as diverse as teaching very young learners, pre-teaching lexis and social media. The contents page is here, and the whole journal is here. You can also read past issues of the journal.
Observations was also the topic of the latest iTDi blog, with posts by Anna Loseva, Josette LeBlanc and Kevin Stein.
Sandy Millin 
A very helpful and useful contribution about the use of observations. I am all for peer observations to assist in professional development and professionalisation of the industry. It is also quite useful to do pop-in observations to gauge the atmosphere of the classroom and the level of the class. Do you think pop-in/buzz observations are useful? They usually last between five to ten minutes.
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I do, providing the observee has the chance to contextualise the observation – that could have been the only 10 minutes in the class when the students were going crazy for example!
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Hi Sandy,
That is a great article and something I will happily recommend to anyone thinking about starting an observation system at their school. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that there seems to be a certain amount of buzz happening around observation just now. Wonder what that’s all about? If I had to guess, I think that the huge amount of sharing that’s going on in our PLN over the internet is making us all a little more comfortable with feedback in general and maybe we are hoping to pring a little bit of that supportive and nonjudgmental feedback we get out here into our classrooms.
Thanks for a great read,
Kevin
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Hi Kevin,
Thanks for the comment and for sharing the article. It’s been brewing for a while – I promised the observations article two issues ago, so it’s a happy coincidence that I got to it at the same time as iTDi. Having done Delta last year, and just moving into management for the first time, observation has been on my mind a lot. Reading posts from the PLN is a little bit like stepping into other teacher’s classrooms, but I always wonder what it would be like to really be there. That’s one reason I shared videos last year. The supportive feedback I got when posting those was very useful, and really made me think. I’m hoping to do more soon (observing, videoing, and thinking!)
Sandy
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