Classroom observation: desirable conditions established by teachers

Abstract

Teacher observation is regarded as an essential procedure in the teacher training process. However, the vast majority of observation experiences have a top-down approach, as they are usually established by experts such as university teaching staff or school inspectors working for the administration. With a bottom-up approach in mind, this paper examines the attitudes of a wide range of teachers towards observation by focusing the analysis on three classes of attitudinal components: the cognitive, the affective, and the conative components. 185 infant, junior, secondary, university, and private language school teachers completed a questionnaire concerning the role of observation in the language classroom. The main result is a decalogue of prerequisites, a how-to handbook for successful classroom observation, compiled by teachers themselves.