The Observation Cycle

Synopsis of Observation Cycle The observation cycle of the Health Care Cluster (HCC) teacher occurred over a two week period of time: the pre-observation conference a week prior to the observation and the post-observation conference a week after the observation. The pre- and post-conference were informal conversations with the teacher. During the pre-observation conference, the focus of the observation was determined to be how the teacher responds to student questions during a mainly individual work session.
Post-Observation Conference The post-observation conference was held in the HCC teacher’s classroom with us sitting side by side at a table. I had prepared a few questions and statements to start the conversation; however the conversation …show more content…
The conversation expanded to the culture of these students and how comfortable they felt in asking questions or wanting to know the information. She stated that the students do best when provided with snippets or chunks of information. If too much information was presented at once, the students would ask her to slow down or to wait. The conversation then turned to talking about possible ways to chunk instruction and/or to do more formative assessments during the lesson. The conference ended with proposing an action plan of investigating strategies for chunking and in-lesson formative …show more content…
My past experience with the observation cycle from the teacher’s perspective has not been an affective one. As I think back over the twenty plus years in the classroom as a teacher, I have never had an observation with all parts of the cycle. I have had very few pre-observation conferences and when I have they were predominantly going over the form I had completed earlier and given to the principal. There was no conversation on what area I would like to have observed. The pre-observation conference was mainly to set a date and time for the observation. The observation usually had the principal arriving late or leaving early so the entire lesson was not observed. That would have been okay, but the post-observation report would include comments about my openings or summaries being excellent. The feedback was usually a form placed in my mailbox to review and sign if I did not have any questions there would be no conference. The few times that I did have a conference were mainly to go over the form with very little conversation about what was observed. The evaluation was always satisfactory at first and later with some years of teaching moved to distinguish. The problem was that I knew there were areas that I could improve, but I seemed to have no support to help me indentify what