Classroom observation as a means of understanding teaching quality: towards a shared language of teaching?

ABSTRACT

More than forty years ago, Dan Lortie famously lamented the lack of a common language with which to describe teaching and noted this scarcity as a key problem within studies of teaching and teacher professionalism. I argue that recent developments in video technology and supporting methodological designs have paved the way for a new generation of classroom studies. Today, large-scale classroom studies and targeted subject-specific studies have contributed to a renewed interest in classroom designs as lenses to shed light on how and why teaching and teaching matter. In this article, I summarize recent developments in classroom studies in terms of technologies, research design and analytical frameworks and discuss how these developments allow for integrative efforts and more programmatic research within studies of classroom teaching and learning, thus providing a platform for building a shared vocabulary for describing teaching. A key argument will be how video recordings nurture a new generation of generic and subject-specific classroom studies that enable us to systematically investigate key features of classroom teaching across subjects, grades, and learning environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Classroom studies
• observation manuals
• teaching quality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The latter element ‘Accommodation for Language Learning (ALL)’ is not included in the analyses in the present article.

2. The Quality in Nordic Teaching (QUINT) centre is a Nordic Centre of Excellence, funded through the Nordic Research Councils, NordForsk, and uses video capturing from lower secondary.

mathematics, language arts and social science classrooms to address features of teaching quality across Nordic classrooms.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the NordForsk [87663]