Beyond box ticking: Recognizing the power of choice for creating genuine opportunities for developmental observations

The pre-sessional team at a university in the Midlands (U.K.) trialled a new observation approach in which teachers had a choice between three observation types: online seen live (synchronous); online seen recorded (asynchronous); and unseen. This presented the opportunity to consider what impact, if any, the type of observation has on observer and observee perceptions and experiences of lesson observations. Perceptions of the observations were collected via focus groups and interviews and were analyzed using a pragmatic version of grounded theory (Barbour, 2018). Preliminary findings suggest that the type of observation can dial up or down certain qualities of the observation, such as who controls the data and whether observations are seen as high or low risk, creating opportunities to move beyond box ticking and towards using observations for meaningful individualized continuing professional development (CPD). This may be especially important in the pre-sessional context, in which many practitioners work under precarious circumstances, with increasingly limited access to meaningful CPD and diminishing opportunities for experimentation within their practice (le Roux, 2022). This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.