The classroom observation tasks

Be yourself

• A classroom observation is not the time to reinvent yourself or experiment with teaching style changes. If what you've been doing before the observation worked for you, then stick to that.
• You need to feel comfortable and confident, and that's easier to achieve when you know what you're doing.
• Changing what and how you deliver your lessons may very well work in your favour, but reserve that change for when nobody else will be watching you do it.
• Be clear about lesson objectives.
• At the end of the day, you're teaching children and not just trying to impress colleagues.
• So, make sure that before you start your observed lessons, your students know what to expect. What will they have learned once it's over?
• Be realistic. Your students may be able to start sounding off vowels after only one lesson. But it's doubtful they'll be able to read if they've never done it before.
• Also, exactly how are you going to assess if your lesson objectives have been met? Are there defined success criteria?

DISADVANTAGES OF CLASSROOM OBSERVATIONS:

• Of course, everything has disadvantages - even something that seems as beneficial as classroom observations.
• One of the biggest happens to be the fact that everyone assumes it's easy. You just sit in class and watch what the teacher does and how they interact with students. Then at the end, you give your feedback. And that's it: job done. The truth, though, is that it's hard to evaluate classroom dynamics. Even if you think you know what a good lesson looks like, chances are, you really don't.Maybe you can move past your own ideas of what teaching should be like and be able to provide the teacher you're observing with valuable insight they can use. But sometimes, you won't be able to. And you'll fall into the trap of just telling the teacher what you would've done in their place.This is assuming that you've had proper training before performing your observation, which isn't always the case.
• In fact, the evidence seems to show that when different untrained observers judge a lesson's quality, they don't often agree with each other's assessments. For example, suppose two evaluators watch the same lesson. Research has shown that if the first one judges that lesson to be outstanding, there's a 51% to 78% that the second observer will disagree.