One of the important aspects of alternative assessment
is called observation. Observation is basic to assessing human skills and
behaviors. This specialized method of collecting information can elicit
behavior, attitudes or skills to be observed under specific circumstances. Observation in the classroom can be a trustworthy way of observing teacher – student interaction in order to
describe and understand second language teaching and learning.
This useful method allows teachers observe how
students respond to and use instructional materials and how they interact during
group work; teachers can also observe how effectively they themselves are
presenting particular lessons, units, and so on. On the basis of their observations, teachers can
assess what students have not learned, they infer the learning strategies
students may be using that are facilitating or impeding learning, the
effectiveness of particular teaching strategies and determine which
instructional activities and materials students enjoy.
The information gather from these observations
provides a basic understanding of what is happening in the classroom, and it
can be used for making decisions about what should follow, for making
inferences about instructional or learning process strategies, and for planning
instructions of unit, lessons or courses. On the other hand, classroom
observation should be organized in a systematic and manageable way in order to
know how to record the resulting information and inferences, and how to make
use of this information in planning effective instruction. This organization is
done accordingly to your instructional plans and focus on instructional content,
organization, materials, equipment, and activities.
In order to do a classroom observation is important to
identify why you want to observe and, more specifically, what kind of decisions
you want to be able to make based on your observations. Once you have identified
why and what to observe, you can decided how to observe, it can be on
individual students for detail information or on group of students for
diagnosing whether things are working for the whole class as intended.
To sum up, observation in the classroom is really
important because it allows teacher to do an analysis of how the class is
working, students’ weakness or strengths in order to make decisions and identify
possible problems or difficulties.