Collaborative design of a teaching observation grid to facilitate the acceptance of teaching observation practices

• Autores: Leonardo Caporarello, F. Cirulli, M. Milani
• Localización: EDULEARN20 Proceedings: 12th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (July 6th-7th, 2020, Online) / coord. por Luis Gómez Chova, A. López Martínez, I. Candel Torres, 2020, ISBN 978-84-09-17979-4, págs. 4531-4536
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Teaching observation (TO) is a powerful tool for providing feedback to teachers [1], disseminating good practices and fostering teaching enhancement [2].In the international field of higher education, TO plays an important role in the understanding of the teaching experience and in supporting a new vision for Faculty Development (FD) [3,4]. These benefits are lost when formative opportunities are not fully integrated into observation (and training) processes [5]. In the Italian higher education system, FD initiatives are now increasing and there is interest on this front. The most part of universities started teachers’ training activities but few experiences of TO have been designed and implemented [6]. Students' point of view collected via the official questionnaires is, till now, the only adopted instrument. Nevertheless, expert observation can give a different perspective complementary to student’s feedback.Although the implementation of observation criteria and tools matters, a better design allows a better performance achievement [7]. For this reason, an adequate design of the entire TO proposal is important to better define purposes and avoid the risk to let TO be only an evaluative tool. Based on this, our study aims to show methods and results of the collaborative process of design and validation of a TO grid involving both teachers and designers. Project's phases are the following: design of the grid draft; focus groups’ organization; focus groups’ delivery; focus groups’ outputs analysis; second draft of the grid; validation of the grid via the adoption in the real context. From a practical point of view, we offer suggestions on how to develop a TO grid co-design process. From a research point of view, we support TO acceptance by faculty and we monitor the introduction of a TO practice in a context in which it is not already usual. Future research could include the designer observation of the teacher and the teacher self-observation.