Drawing on Siedentop’s Legacy to Revisit Systematic Observation of Teaching: Identifying and Addressing Key Validity and Reliability Questions

ABSTRACT

Focusing on systematic observation, one of the most potent methods of studying teaching quality, represents one of the numerous contributions of Daryl Siedentop to the profession. While he had a clear focus on issues of validity and reliability concerning systematic observation, over the past decades, attention to such issues appears to have eroded. By drawing on Siedentop’s contribution to systematic observation and the guidance he provided on gathering quality data, in this paper we discuss the lessons learned from his work regarding what needs to be observed, how, by whom, and under what conditions – all addressing important validity and reliability issues. We argue that closely attending to these issues is critical not only for reinvigorating a research field initiated by scholars such as Siedentop but also for restoring its key role in studying teaching quality.

KEYWORDS:

• Physical education
• observation systems
• quality observational data
• teaching quality

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. In this paper, we use the term “teaching quality” instead of the term “teacher effectiveness” because we focus on the quality of teaching (defined as “features of teachers’ […] practices well known to be positively related to student outcomes,” Nilsen et al., 2016, p. 5) rather than attempting to link teaching quality to student learning (captured by the term “teaching effectiveness,” Nilsen et al., 2016).

2. By the term teaching practices, we refer to the teacher’s actions and interactions with the students and the subject matter which can contribute to student learning (Grossman, 2018; Ward, 2021).

3. Generalizability studies are mostly concerned with addressing issues of reliability (see Shavelson & Webb, 1991).