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This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Peter Viney

Chuck Sandy

Panelists: Marc | Peter | Chuck
Date: July 2002
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Topic: "Peer Observation"

Chuck Sandy

Not long ago I was sitting in a café casually eavesdropping on the couple next to me. They were having some disagreement over what had actually taken place between them the previous evening. They continued for some time with increasing levels of volume until finally the man said, "You just don’t see things the way I do." Then he stood up and walked out. End of discussion. How I wanted to ask the woman about what had actually happened, but of course I couldn’t, and besides whatever she could have told me would have been only her version of events. Still, the man’s statement lingered with me and I thought of how true this is. In any situation as complicated as one involving humans and perception, nobody involved in the situation sees things accurately or the same way. It’s almost a cliché, but a basic truth.

Perception of events in a personal relationship is complicated enough, but then multiply the dynamics by the number of students in a classroom, add the teacher, calculate the number and type of relationships in that classroom, figure in the all the other factors that make up a lesson, and you begin to understand how complex a classroom actually is. Now add an observer who’s arrived with his or her own set of perceptions and beliefs about what a language lesson should be, and you’ve got a situation where it’s very likely that some version of the statement, "you just don’t see things the way I do" is going to be said before too long.

Mr. H., owner of a now defunct language school, was one of the first people to ever observe my class in such a sense. Not only did he basically say "You just don’t see things the way I do," but then he actually stopped my lesson, stood up, took over the class, worked with them for a few minutes, then turned to me and said, "Now, see if you can do it the way I just did it." Then, he walked out.

Fortunately, most of my other experiences with observation have been much more positive, but they didn’t get too much better until I started investigating the possibilities of peer observation and using those opportunities to begin learning how to see both what actually takes place in a classroom and myself through a colleague’s eyes.

Peer observation is a tool for learning, professional growth, and development. It involves exploration and reflection rather than evaluation. By observing each other in this sense, teacher’s become initiators of their own development rather than being developed by a higher authority in the form of a teacher trainer or school administrator. In peer observation, the observer doesn’t judge and therefore never says anything like "that’s not the way I’d do it."

Instead, he or she minimalizes the dazzling complexity of the classroom by using an observation-task to zoom in on one single aspect of the lesson, observes carefully, and then reports on what actually happened in a follow-up discussion session.

Setting up a peer-observation program is as simple as finding a colleague or colleagues willing to observe your classes and willing to let you observe theirs. Such a program often begins during a discussion over lunch or in the hallway between classes when one teacher says something like, "I’m not sure why my students are speaking so much Japanese in class, but I’d like to find out." Then another teacher says, "The same thing happens in my class. What do you think the reasons might be?" A discussion takes place, and perhaps as informally as on a napkin or on a scrap of paper the two teachers make a list of possible reasons for L1 use in the classroom. It may not seem like much, but what they’re actually doing is designing an observation task.

Later, one of the two teachers might type up the list of reasons for L1 use in the classroom into chart form so that it looks something like this:

The two teachers would then get together and make plans to observe each other’s class, and when the observation took place, the observer would arrive with the observation task sheet in hand. He or she would then simply observe this aspect of the class and make a tick under the appropriate column whenever a student spoke L1. No evaluation takes place. No judgements are made. The observer merely focuses and observes.

After the two teacher have had a chance to observe each other’s class, they would then sit down for a discussion. What arises from the discussion is based on what actually took place. What changes in classroom behavior or organization result are based on learning that’s taken place because of the observation. The entire process begins with an inquiry and ends with a discussion and often a change in how things are done in the classroom ­ not because someone has said "you don’t see things the way I do" or "you don’t do things the way I’d do them" but because it’s now possible to see what’s actually happening.

The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia once said in an interview, "sometimes I see things that aren’t even there." He had his reasons, but as a teacher my reasons were blindness and the inability to both teach and observe at the same time. In one of my classes, I was convinced that a small group of students were either discussing me, the class, or maybe lunch in Japanese while I was trying to teach. In time, I even started to dislike them. Then, based on a colleague’s observation using a version of the task above I discovered that what they were mostly talking about was what they were supposed to be doing. They moved from there to asking to borrow someone’s dictionary or textbook. When they got completely lost, they’d begin talking about lunch. Having a colleague observe my class allowed me to see what was happening and freed me of my misconceptions. The follow-up discussion allowed me to understand the problem, and rearranging the class organization, simplifying my instructions, and simply walking over to help when L1 started popping out allowed me to mostly solve the problem.

Later peer-observation sessions involved focusing on aspects of the lesson such as the types of feedback we were giving to students, whether or not we were interacting with all students equally, whether men were speaking out more often than women, how long we’d wait for someone to answer a question, and what types of questions we were asking in class. Designing the tasks allowed us to focus and learn to see, using the tasks in the observations forced us to look carefully, and discussing the issues informally and openly afterwards allowed us to both develop as teachers and understand if not solve classroom problems.

The philosopher Kennich Ohmae writes that "we forget that the world looks the way it does because we’ve become accustomed to seeing it that way." To complicate matters even further, what the writer Anais Nin says is also true: "We don’t see things the way they are. We see things the way we are." This is what leads us to misinterpret and judge and perhaps walk out of cafés when others don’t see things the way we do. It’s what makes us cringe when a teacher trainer says, "that’s not the way I’d do it" or "I thought things could have been organized better but you’ve got a nice classroom manner." Such a statement is not based on observation but rather on the teacher-trainer’s perceptions and judgements, on who he or she is. Such a statement does not lead to development or change because it’s based on how one person has become accustomed to seeing the world, delivered with the message that this version of the world is somehow true. It’s not.

A man walks out of a café. Mr. H. says, "now see if you can do it the way I just did it." A teacher-trainer says, "you’ve got a nice classroom manner." I say to myself, "those students are speaking Japanese and talking about me." None of this gets anyone anywhere, but peer-observation does because it’s rooted in genuine inquiry and based in the truth of what’s seen, of what’s truly there.

Panelists: Marc | Peter | Chuck

Chuck Sandy, Chubu University

Co-author of two series from CUP, Passages and Connect

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