Looking in Classrooms

I am 43 and the proud father of an animated, curious, and slightly demented 17 month- old. But though I have only recently had any personal experience raising a child, parents have been asking me for advice on how to raise their children for the last 21 years.

While this has placed me in some awkward - and some amusing - situations, what I have come to understand is that an educator's perspective is often quite different from that of parents. And I have also come to understand that part of educating students successfully has to do with educating parents successfully.

Parents often lack confidence about how to determine whether their children are engaged in a positive educational experience. And this is entirely natural, since it can difficult for parents to understand what goes on in classrooms and thus determine what good education is and what it is not.

For instance, parents often want to know if a particular teacher is "good." I invariably suggest that they go and see for themselves; however, parents do not always know what to look for when observing a class, so here are some things I try to remember when I go into a classroom.

First of all, be suspicious of any teacher who denies you, overtly or covertly, the right to observe. There are times when it may be inappropriate for classes to have guests (e.g., during testing), but essential to good teaching is dialogue, and if you're not invited into the dialogue, that should raise a caution flag.

Second of all, it is of the utmost importance to narrow your focus when you go into a classroom. Because the classroom is such a creative environment, there is a natural tendency for observers to be distracted by the sheer variety of observable behaviors.

Picture this: You know nothing about baseball but are given tickets to Fenway Park to see my beloved Red Sox. If you are interested in trying to educate yourself about the game, instead of soaking up the atmosphere - the Green Monster, the Bleacher Bums - you might begin by trying to figure out the relationships between the players. You would need to focus on the relationships between the pitcher and the batter, between the batters and the bases, between the various fielders, etc. You would need to discover why the teams switched places; you would need to note when someone touched home plate. In short, you would need to observe specific behaviors in order to reach some educated conclusions about how the game is played.

Observing a class is no different. You might be able to get a sense of the atmosphere, but it would be subjective. However, if you had some data which quantified specific behaviors, you would be able to ask some educated questions about what happened and why.

For instance, if you designed a sheet that was a physical representation of the classroom complete with the positions of teacher and students and then drew lines between anyone who engaged in dialogue, you would construct a visual chart of the verbal interaction between members of the class. This would help you discover to what extent the class is teacher-centered, for the more lines which terminated with the teacher, the more the teacher dominated discussion. That information is useful because it might lead to the following educated questions: 1) is the teacher aware of this pattern? 2) if so, is there a reason for it - perhaps the teacher was introducing new material? and 3) might another approach be more effective?

By narrowing the focus, by collecting observable data, by asking thoughtful questions based on that data, and by engaging the teacher in dialogue about what, why, and how - anyone (especially parents) observing a class can reach some educated conclusions about whether a teacher is "good" or not.

--Steve McKibben
12/4/05