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Abstract
The observation of students' practice has been a mandatory component of the assessment of social work students in the UK for 15 years, and its significance has been enhanced by recent regulatory reforms. In this article I shall highlight the major problems in ‘thinking’ about the nature of observation as an assessment tool with reference to the literature in this area, and then explore the problems in ‘doing’ student observations with reference to interviews with practice teachers. These illustrate their tendencies to contaminate the observation by straying into the realms of participation and intervention, and then to curtail the assessment by downplaying the views of other parties. Many people seem to be observing students' practice through a looking glass mirror which reflects their own images and interventions back to them, and ways of converting the looking glass mirror into a one‐way mirror are examined.