Name: The passionately boring teacher
Twitter name: @MissSayers1
Sector: Secondary
Subject taught (if applicable):
Position: Teacher
What is your advice about? Observation Etiquette and Good Practice (as a teaching student)
- Try to go into the observation with a specific focus. If you go try to pick up on everything, you’ll end up with very shallow observations.
- Linked to point 1, try to leave the lesson with one piece of good practice which you want to incorporate into your own teaching. Consider the rationale behind this carefully.
- Thank you person you’ve observed and communicate the piece of good practice you saw to them; it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been teaching, being observed is still a bit scary and positive feedback is always lovely to hear.
- Pick your moment to look at books or have discussions with pupils. Even if you whisper, when teachers hear someone talk when they are, they often instinctively go into ‘teacher mode’ and will find it distracting.
- Write up your notes as soon as you can. Even if it’s just a few sentences, writing up all of your observations will give you a wealth of evidence and will remind of you techniques you can gradually incorporate.
Starter for Five 