Classroom observation

Qualitative research is aimed at gaining a deep understanding of human groups in social settings and the meanings that emerge from them. It aims to obtain a better understanding through participants’ firsthand experience, truthful reporting and accounts of actual practices. Observation, as a research tool, generates in-depth, rich data on events and human experiences that is inaccessible by other research methods.

Observation methods have a long tradition in educational research. They serve to create a ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) of what people actually do as opposed to what they say they do. Observation is an increasingly common data collection strategy in studies attempting to understand people’s cognition and behaviour. Observation, as a data collection technique, was considered crucial for this study because it is a very direct method for portraying human behaviour. It provides ways to check for nonverbal expression of feelings and describe behaviours, intentions, situations and events as experienced by participants’ in the natural settings of their classrooms. Observation can offer insights into what teachers do as opposed to what they say they do. Due to the cognitive dimension which this study seeks to explore, I opted for employing observation as a data collection method supporting Borg’s (2003c: 105) scepticism:

Can language teacher cognition be usefully studied without reference to what happens in the classrooms? Personally I am sceptical .. Ultimately, .., we are interested in understanding teachers’ professional actions, not what or how they think in isolation of what they do.

For my study, the complexity of the construct ‘belief’ as one which guides conception and action necessitated a process of studying it in more than one dimension. Observation was thus expected to assist this task; it was chosen to help consider potential congruence or differences between stated beliefs expressed narratively in an interview or autobiographical account and classroom actions in real teaching. Whether or not teachers act upon their beliefs in their classroom was expected to provide insights into the overall aim of this study, i.e.

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the learning to teach experience of beginning teachers, which cannot be understood without referring to what teachers do, through observation. Further, observation, by producing situationally generated data and especially when followed by post-observation verbal commentaries (which are used in this study in the form of stimulated recall), also assisted in understanding why teachers did what they did in the classroom, which can inform the aim of the study regarding the influence of contextual factors on the process of learning to teach.

As for the level of participation, I decided to adopt a non-participant observer role, “where the researcher in the classroom typically sits at the back, makes notes and avoids interacting with teacher or students during the events being observed” (Borg, 2006: 231). Borg (2006) continues that studies attempting to understand beliefs and practice tend to opt for non-participant observations where researchers attend lessons and take notes but avoid any interaction with teachers or students. Examples of such a non-participant observation process can be found in Bailey (1996), Borg, (2005b), Richards and Pennington (1998), Tsang (2004) and Tsui (2003).

In terms of observation structure, unstructured observations were chosen – ‘unstructured’ here does not mean the absence of an objective behind the observation, as it is unlikely to carry out a classroom observation without having in mind some themes to explore. Rather, ‘unstructured’ here means the absence of concrete pre-specified categories on an observation schedule sheet to be ticked during the observation like those used in positivistic approaches which aim at deciding whether or not a teacher has done something rather than describing what they do in a more open manner. The unstructured observations were intended to help capture the classroom events following an open approach (Everston and Green, 1986) so that unanticipated, but potentially insightful instances and behaviours cannot be missed. Examples of learning-to-teach studies using unstructured observations include Borg (1999a) and Phipps and Borg (2009). The open approach was facilitated in my study by the use of video rather than audio, recording, which was believed to apply the principles of ‘thick descriptions’ and help uncover the reality of the classroom life and track the contributions of teachers and students in the classroom, particularly in terms of who is speaking at

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any one time. Videos were also thought to be more useful than audio for teachers when they watch themselves in action during the stimulated recall sessions; it was assumed that videos would enable participants to ‘relive’ (Calderhead, 1981: 212) the episode on the video, which helps them provide more accurate accounts of the thought processes underlying their actions in the classroom. The recorded videos were expected to offer a richer, more detailed picture of the teaching observed and allow more categories to emerge in the analysis process, thanks to the built-in ‘saving’ feature associated with camcorder.

I also decided to take fieldnotes about what I thought could be relevant to the study, especially in terms of questions like ‘why did you do what you did here?’ Such fieldnotes were intended to assist in raising this type of questions during the stimulated recall sessions. I also wanted to take fieldnotes on issues which cannot be captured due to the limited angle of focus of the camera lens (e.g. number of students and their gender, OHP, wall posters, computers and sound amplifiers).