Page 301 - Beyond Methods

Monitoring teaching acts 289
• although they emphasize qualitative or ethnographic techniques, they are dependent to a large extent on quantification of class- room events.
• althoughtheyemphasizeexplanationandinterpretation,theyoffer very little guidance about how to explain or interpret the observed phenomena.
Most of the classroom observation models, whether they are product- or process-oriented, use coding procedures that are sel- dom user-friendly. Anybody who has used them knows that they are cumbersome, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. Besides, any useful or usable information that can be derived from these obser- vational tools is highly disproportionate to the time and effort that go into applying them. If the ultimate goal of classroom observation is to enable teachers to think systematically and critically about their classroom practices so that what they do in class may turn out to be a principled activity, then these classroom observation models can hardly accomplish that goal. That is perhaps one reason why Allwright (1988, p. 196) rhetorically asked: “Who needs category systems?”
Teachers Need a User-Friendly System
I believe that, to be relevant for teachers, any classroom observa- tional tool must minimally offer them open-ended possibilities and user-friendly procedures for self-observing, self-analyzing, and self- evaluating their teaching acts. It should help them understand the opportunities and challenges facing them as teachers. It should di- rect them away from knowledge transmission and toward knowl- edge generation; away from pedagogic dependence and toward ped- agogic independence. It should also enable them, where possible, to reflect on educational, institutional, and sociocultural forces that directly or indirectly shape the character and content of classroom discourse.
Only such a tool can help teachers transform their tacit under- standing of classroom events into explicit knowledge that can feed directly into the construction of their own theory of practice. More specifically, and in the context of a postmethod pedagogy, an ob- servational tool must help teachers analyze and understand (a) pos- sible multiple perspectives to classroom events, (b) potential mis- matches between teacher intention and learner interpretation, and