Faculty Peer Observation

There is no shortage of things that you can learn by reflecting on your teaching in the company of your peers. There is, likewise, no shortage of protocols you might follow when observing and taking notes on someone else's class. Over time, even professional teaching consultants trained in one or more of the most common methods of class observation develop their own practices for note-taking and debriefing on the basis of their personal experience.

There are a number of different things to which you might pay attention when observing a colleague's class, including:

• framing. How is the instructor setting up the day's work? Is there a written agenda in the slides or on the board? Guidance on how to complete specific activities? Does the instructor make explicit how this class period connects to or builds upon other classes and/or any homework?

• student activity. What are students actually doing at any given moment of the class period? Are they listening and taking notes? Problem solving with a peer? Brainstorming or discussing as a group, or as a whole class?

• speech patterns. Who talks? How often? In response to whom, and directed to whom? (Do students talk to each other, or only to the instructor?) Do any students seem to be having difficulty breaking into the conversation?

• levels of student engagement. Are there moments or activities when students seem especially engaged? Less engaged? Disengaged altogether?

• signs of confusion. Are there moments when students seem especially lost, either about a course concept or about how to complete an activity?

• spatial relationships. Where is the teacher? Always at the front of the room, or moving among the students? Are students able to interact with each other freely? What constraints do the room and the furniture place upon what the instructor can achieve?

• materials. What kinds of course materials are being used, and are students able to view/access/interact with them easily? Are slides easy to view? If there is a shared text, does everyone have a copy?

Insofar as there are "best practices" around recording and sharing data from peer observations, we would highlight the following:

• Remember to inhabit the viewpoint of a student (i.e. as opposed to a faculty colleague). Try to reframe your personal responses to what you are observing in terms of what a student might experience in that moment. Asking yourself "did I like how she asked that question?" is less helpful to your colleague than asking "if I were a student, what would I have learned from that question?"

• Remember to separate, as much as possible, your neutral descriptions of what you observe from your (necessarily subjective) interpretations of the dynamics you believe to be in play. As you will see below, many teaching consultants elect to take notes in a two-column format, reserving one column for dry observations ("10:03am - Professor welcomed students and reminded them of upcoming midterm") and a second column for questions or thoughts that occur to them about what they are seeing ("Would it be helpful to pause in case the students have any questions here?"). This allows you, in the debrief phase, to establish a shared "text" of the class—a record of "what happened"—that can ground your higher-order discussions of "what it means."

• Frame your observations, when possible, as questions. Peer observations are a great way to re-acquaint yourself with how a novice might encounter your subject. Remember to ask why your colleague makes the choices he or she makes. If you are confused about why a certain transition between two topics seemed "natural" to the instructor, chances are that it was confusing to at least some of the students, too.

Here are some protocols that the Bok Center's senior staff have identified as particularly useful to Harvard faculty:

• The Bok Center's own peer observation protocol
• The Harkness Method of mapping discussions
• A Thematic Rubric for Peer Observation