OBSERVATIONS IN THE CLASSROOM  

As a teacher with little experience, I used to observe and make notes during the classes but I did it without a clear purpose in mind. I never set the objectives of my observation and I never stated the specific things I was going to observe; maybe, I did it only when I had to observe in order to assess a skill or to give a grade.

In my case, I think I did it because I did not know about the benefits of observing neither I knew the steps that I had to take into account before observing. Now, having read chapter five, I have a clearer idea of what observing means and involves.

Observations in the classroom are very important and useful. They can be used to gather information about language use, students’ likes and dislikes, the learning strategies that they use, the effectiveness of teaching strategies and so on. Besides, observation can be of great help for teachers if they want to improve their teaching methods; and in the same way, they can be helpful if teachers want to follow the sequence of the curriculum and to know the right time when they can go on with a new topic or they need to reinforce what is being studied.

If observation is going to take place in the classroom and in order for the observation to be successful, teachers have to make some decisions before such as: the reasons for carrying out the observation, what is going to be observed and how to observe. The observation can be done to individual students or to groups, during a single session or during several sessions, during prearranged activities or during routine classroom activities.

In order to do a classroom observation, we can use different types of recording procedures, some of them are: anecdotal records, checklists and rating scales. The first ones being the most informal, taking more time to do and being open while the checklists and the rating scales take less time and effort to complete and are close ended.

All this aspects that observation in the classroom involves are of paramount importance if we want to know more about our students, and if we want to improve the teaching methods in order to create more successful learning experiences for our students.