Next time you are with a school colleague, ask them to tell you about their last lesson. Chances are, they will give you some headline details about the class, cohort, and particular pupil characteristics.
They will probably also give you some key information about content covered and perhaps some insights into a sample of activities or tasks carried out during the lesson.
They may also tell you some kind of comparative reflection – comparing what their intentions for that lesson were with how they feel the lesson went in practice. They might share some stories or reflections about a particular child or group of pupils.
Now, here’s a thought. Your school may be an exception to this, but very rarely do conversations about classroom practice surface how the learners in that lesson actually “internalised” their experience.
In other words, going beyond teacher intentions and assumptions, and digging down into evidence about children’s experiences. For example:
- Did the learners really make meaningful real-world connections between the lesson and their own wider life?
- Did they genuinely feel intrinsically motivated to engage with a particular idea or piece of content?
- How did the learner perceive themselves as a learner in that subject – did it build their confidence (as a scientist or a writer) or challenge their self-esteem?
- Did the lesson experience teach them to independently seek out new ideas about a topic or teach them to be dependent on teachers to drip-feed new knowledge?
We often talk about our intentions for classroom experiences, but how often do we look at these through the eyes of our learners?
As part of my role as a consultant researcher I spend a lot of time in classrooms working alongside school leaders as we unpick exactly what learners are experiencing.
We do this in order to develop a much deeper understanding about classroom practice – moving beyond assumptions and good intentions and deliberately uncovering different versions of lived realities. This difference is known as a perception-reality gap.
Examining the perception-reality gap provides a much more realistic baseline for school improvement and is a very deliberate way of challenging assumptions that we can all too often make about classroom practice.
There can sometimes be a big difference between what a teacher intends to happen or believes has happened, and what a learner actually experienced and internalised.
Very rarely do learners articulate their internalised experiences to their teacher but – as we all know – how we feel inside and what we think about internally can often be quite a profound influence on our actions and our ability to engage with the environment around us.
Consequently, the perception-reality gap can be quite significant – and these differences have important implications for appropriately and precisely targeting intervention, strategy, and support for both teachers and learners alike.
Here are some top tips to find out what’s really going on in a classroom:
Framing your visit: When you visit a class, frame the visit as you being there to learn about how that classroom works rather than “to see how they are getting on”. The language is important – move away from words and phrases that suggest you are evaluating or judging the practice. If you are focused on evaluation or monitoring, you are looking for particular things (i.e. either confirming or refuting that specific things are taking place). The aim here is to learn about practice – so being open to discovering things you potentially did not even know existed.
Start from the side: When you join the class, immerse yourself in the room alongside the learners. Aim to watch from the “side” of the classroom to start with so that you can see the facial expressions of the learners. Avoid standing at the back – it changes classroom power dynamics and shifts the focus onto the teacher which is not what you are there for.
Be fully present: Become one of the learning group – leave any clipboards, notepads, or devices somewhere else. As soon as you start writing notes, the learners and teacher will feel evaluated, and their behaviour will change. Join in with activities where possible and appropriate – this will help the class see you as being there to learn, not there to evaluate.
Just watch: Sit with the children on the carpet, or at their tables. Let them know you are there to learn from them about how their classroom works and emphasise that they are the expert about their classroom and that you are simply learning from them. Importantly, don’t become the person that conversation or attention pivots around because that will change classroom dynamics. Avoid the temptation to ask lots of questions. Just watch.
Pick one learner: Just one – to watch for 10 to 15 minutes. You’ll learn far more about the detail of learner experience by observing just one learner. The knack here is to sit near enough to them so that you can see their face, their work, and hear their conversation, but not close enough that they feel watched. One way to do this is to sit at the same table and talk to a different nearby pupil for a few moments first, before then shifting your attention to quietly watching your target pupil.
A face tells a story: Once you have identified which learner you are going to focus on, watch their facial expression for a sustained period of time. Notice the triggers for sustained effort, joy, disappointment, confusion, anxiety. Identify what it is that is creating these triggers, e.g. particular interactions with the teacher or peers, things that the learner sees/hears, particular teaching strategies (e.g. anxiety as a result of cold calling), or particular learning activities (e.g. frustration over a misconception). Don’t step in with praise or intervention – watch what happens as a consequence of those emotions. Watch what the learner does. For example, do they celebrate success and perhaps lose momentum after key achievements, do they self-direct towards help materials when they get stuck or displace their focus by having a drink? Look carefully at how they respond to key events, and then what they do as a result.
Triangulate: After watching your target learner for a period of time from a distance engage in conversation directly with them – but quietly, supportively and with open questions that focus on you learning more, not them confirming your hypothesis. Ask them to talk you through the last 15 minutes – and just listen carefully. Reflect on how aware they are about what they are doing when they face challenge, success, failure, frustration, and so on. Gently probe to find out how they perceive the everyday classroom actions and experiences that you have just observed. Good phrases include “Talk me through…” or “Can you help me to understand what happens when…”.
Research observations
These kind of research observations allow a very subtle type of insight to surface – revealing the ways that our teaching intentions are interpreted by our pupils.
In his book What Works May Hurt: Side effects in education (2018), Professor Yong Zhao talks about the unintended consequences of evidence-informed practice in education – sometimes resulting in new kinds of issues or contradictions that we don’t even know are happening, or the “side-effects” of interventions or approaches.
However, with this “just one” approach to observing classroom practice (so called because it focuses on just one learner at a time), we are able to zoom in on how teaching intentions and strategies are received, experienced, and internalised by our learners.
It is far more detailed but doesn’t need to be time-consuming. Sometimes a 10-minute observation using a “just one” approach reveals more than hours of monitoring and learning walks.
That new level of precision provides a far more robust baseline for planning future school improvement – and to borrow the medical analogy further, helps us plan support that takes account of both the intervention and the side-effects.
- Dr Fiona Aubrey-Smith supports schools and trusts with professional learning, education research and strategic planning. She is the founder of One Life Learning, an associate lecturer at the Open University, a founding fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching, and sits on the board of a number of multi-academy and charitable trusts. Follow her on X @FionaAS. Find her previous articles and podcast/webinar appearances via www.headteacher.com/authors/dr-fiona-aubrey-smith