When the evil pops in: exploring the unheard voices of teachers working in private language schools in Iran concerning supervisory observation

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons behind teachers’ negative attitudes about classroom observation. This multiple-case study interviewed five teachers from different private language schools in Iran. The themes emerging from in-depth interviews suggest that the negative attitudes could be related to the observer effect, teacher’s performance anxiety, lack of external motivation, ambiguity of the purpose of observation, the hierarchical nature of teacher–supervisor relationship, job insecurity and lack of sense of belonging, disregarding the developmental level of the supervisee, accompanying observation with no other techniques, lack of teacher autonomy, improper quality, quantity, and frequency of the visits, improper quality and quantity of feedbacks, improper quality of communicating the feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Purposive sampling was selected because I needed to focus on the participants who could be most likely to contribute relevant data. Through this type of sampling, I could identify the cases which I judged to be suitable to be included in the sample. In fact, the participants were the most extreme cases which, I believed, could provide in-depth understanding about the reasoning behind negative opinions, as a result of their professional role, experience and attitudinal perspective. I decided that it was essential to have access to those teachers who not only had the experience of being observed by a supervisor, but who also held negative attitudes toward this phenomenon. Besides, the purposive sampling had a low cost and was convenient in eliciting attitudes, and could help me easily obtain informed consent from the participants.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Razieh Gholaminejad

Razieh Gholaminejad is a PhD candidate at Shahid Beheshti University. Among her research interests are corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, English for specific purposes, and academic English.