The dreaded teaching observation lesson

We've all been in those sometimes terrifying situations when we are told that an observation is being scheduled. At that moment, reverberating in your ears, are those words that every teacher dreads - "teaching observation", and for a nanosecond, time seems to stop or at least get caught in some eternal loop like the space between two Venn diagrams.

It's then a mad scramble to pore through all your best lessons in an attempt to come up with something that resembles a professional, slick, lesson with all the bells and whistles of TEFL-dom; something that shows you know the inner dynamics of this arcane world of language learning; that you know your TTT from your PPP, and your L1 from your IELTS.

Having started my first official TEFL job thirteen years ago in a large private language school in Bangkok, which also doubled as a CELTA training centre, I consider myself lucky as I was observed by Trainee TEFLers on a regular basis for about two years, with the result that I can say with absolute truth that I was observed more times in those first two years than I have the total number of times in my teaching career since.

I would often have my lessons hacked apart by those trainees who were long on theory but short on practical experience. They had been taught the staple diet of TEFL Dos and Don'ts and were eager to cut their teeth on my lessons, so any overconfidence or vanity that might have developed in those early years was soon nipped in the bud by the sometimes scalding comments in that cauldron of a teaching environment, and I'm extremely thankful for it.

For this reason, I am not one of those faint-hearted, wallflower-like TEFLers who shudder at the thought that someone will be coming to my classroom to stare up at me in a schoolmasterly way, with pince-nez glasses, write down every syllable of every instruction bleated out, then tear apart my lesson plan and expose me as a fraud! Yet this feeling persists, and there are many out there who avoid observations as though they were some form of cat and mouse detective game like the one played by the detective Porphyry and Razkalnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

The Purpose

What therefore is the purpose of an Observation lesson? Ideally it should be to evaluate the teaching skills of a teacher which includes their classroom management techniques, specific delivery methods, monitoring skills, concept checking, presentation skills, and the entire gamut of a typical language learning class.

When I did my 6 hours of teaching practice at Stoke-on-Trent College many moons ago, I received really positive and useful feedback about my teaching style which somehow moulded me and, without foisting a particular style upon me, allowed me to make mistakes in a relatively stress free environment. This left me free to develop my own approach to language teaching and at my own pace through trial and error. When I got it wrong, I learned from it. When something worked, I learned from that, too.

In many ways, doing the CELTA is like taking your driving test. You learn all the rules like Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre, and how to understand the Thinking, Braking, and Overall Stopping distance dynamic, but as soon as you pass the test, you start breaking all the rules and cross your arms when moving the steering wheel, instead of holding it at ten-to-two or quarter-to-three like your are supposed to. Does this make you a worse driver? In the same way, does not following all the formal rules of pedagogy make you a lesser teacher? Answers on a postcard to...

Around the world

While this may be what is expected from a teaching observation, it has rarely been the case in my experience of teaching in places like Japan, The Kingdom of Saudia Arabia, and Thailand. In Thailand for example, other than the first two years mentioned above, I was only observed approximately four times in the following years and two of those were demonstration lessons for job applications. In fact the quality and quantity of observations has varied wildly throughout my teaching career.

In the Thai university where I worked for close to five years, and which also had an international English program, I was observed only once, and that probably doesn't even count as an observation, as my boss, a Thai manager, slipped unannounced into my class one wet Wednesday afternoon for about twenty minutes, then disappeared. No follow up feedback was offered and, in fact, the entire episode was never mentioned again. This led me to believe that the observation was more about him being able to tick a box on some management form or, just as much a waste of time, to let me know who was boss rather than being designed for me to gain any pedagogical benefit from it.

In The Kingdom of Saudia Arabia, things were not much different. When I worked in a military establishment, I was observed three times in three months by a non native speaking Arab who was minus a CELTA or any form of TEFL certification, but who criticized me for giving out vocabulary sheets during the observation even though they were dispensed by company employees from the Teaching Supplies store room-cum-supplementary materials' area.

During my final observation, the Arab observer and three full colonels walked around my classroom often blocking the cadets' view of the whiteboard in a classroom where the air conditioning was not functioning and, at one point, it looked as if at least two of my sleep deprived cadets were going to pass out. This for me was another instance of the questionable value of teaching observations as it was more akin to a power game than intended to make me a better teacher.

Reality check

The fact is that observations vary wildly depending on where you go, and it begs the question as to what their real value is? After all, you wouldn't ask a doctor to give a demonstration on how he uses his stethoscope before a physical examination, or ask a plumber to demonstrate his use of a wrench before fixing your leaky pipe, so why should you expect an experienced language teacher to demonstrate their knowledge of the present perfect continuous, or explain how they will teach minimal pairs? If they come with good references and, in an interview, can answer questions on classroom management, grammar, and pedagogy, shouldn't that suffice?

This suggests that, in the fast paced language teaching world where time is often at a premium, teacher development becomes a side issue, which often gets forgotten about, and so the teaching observation is primarily used as an instrument for checking what's going on in the classroom rather than for developing the skills of the teaching practitioner.

 Tom Tuohy is a teacher and writer. His book - ‘Watching the Thais: From the Outside Looking in' - is published by Legend Press, the UK. Versions in both Thai and English will soon be published in Thailand. His blog is - http://ramblingsofanurbancrazyman.blogspot.com/

A more journalistic version of this article will appear in the UK's The Guardian Weekly on 18/09/09 - http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/learningenglish