Observation in the classroom

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.