What does the research tell us?

Research on peer observation of teaching is pretty clear. There are four key benefits that we can take away from engaging in peer observations of teaching. First and foremost is reflection. This one seems pretty obvious, so it might’ve been the first benefit that you even thought of. Well-constructed peer observation programs can help us reflect productively on our teaching. Now that can be a journey that we engage in on our own, but it can also be something that we engage in through conversation with peers. When we invite someone else into our classroom, they see things that we don’t. They ask questions we never considered to ask ourselves ’cause we’ve been doing this for so long, right? We fall into a way of doing and we forget to defamiliarize ourselves with our teaching enough to ask these critical questions. That’s something peers can do. And when they do that for us, it can lead to innovation, which is our second benefit.

When we reflect on our teaching, we start to see things we didn’t before, and that means we see opportunities to change the way we’re doing things. Now it might be that we’re doing a lot of things really well and we just wanna try something new because, hey, spice things up a bit. Or it might be that we see that there’s something that needs to change, and that leads to innovation.

The third benefit that I wanna point out here is that peer observations of teaching can lead to confidence. When you hear your peers affirm that you are in fact doing something well, it boosts your confidence. Now you might suspect all along that you were doing something well, or like me, you might actually think maybe you weren’t doing something well. I recall very vividly, a number of years ago when I was a new graduate instructor and I was required to have an observation by the director of the writing program. And this was announced to me one day randomly, and I said, “Oh boy.” That’s kind of intimidating, right? He chose the day that he was coming and this was my first semester teaching. I was incredibly intimidated to have the director of the writing program come and evaluate me, in part because I wasn’t super confident in my teaching, which meant that I wanted to hide it away so that other people didn’t know what I was doing and they couldn’t tell me I was doing it wrong. Well, wasn’t it a surprise to me when he came in and actually told me I was doing things that were right, that my activities were engaging, that students were responding to me. While that was an anxiety-producing experience because I didn’t know what to expect, ultimately the feedback boosted my confidence and made me more likely to seek out observations of my teaching in the future.

The fourth benefit that I wanna talk about is community. So I just mentioned, and you’ve heard Claudia mentioned, that as a grad student, we were both observed and the uncertainty around that made us anxious. You also heard me say that I tried to hide my teaching away ’cause I was afraid of getting feedback that said I was doing it poorly. But when I opened up my classroom to someone else and I found out that I was doing things right, I started to have those teaching conversations. Building confidence also helped me reach out and build community. It helped me talk to others about what was going right in my teaching, and it helped me to be more vulnerable about maybe what wasn’t going right and asking for feedback from others.

Now these are all the things that are right with peer observation. When you’re doing effective peer observations, these are the benefits research tells us we can reap from that, and I have experienced them. But then there’s the other side of peer observations that don’t go quite right. When we conduct peer observations poorly, there are actually a number of negatives that can come out of that. The first being anxiety. So thinking back to my own experience as a grad student and Claudia’s experience as a grad student, these are anxiety-producing peer observations because we didn’t know what to expect, because this is an act of vulnerability, and because it was forced on us without any sort of context or support to understand why this was happening, other than we’re gonna evaluate whether you’re good or not. So that kind of anxiety, when it festers, can breed distrust. If you distrust the person who’s coming into your classroom, if this is forced on you without context, without support, that distrust breeds tension. Tensions can arise when we have things like power disparities between the observer and the observed. So think about the context that Claudia and I both gave you just a moment ago. We were graduate students observed by faculty members. The purpose of that observation seemed extremely evaluative, and in fact, it might have felt like our graduate stipends were riding on the outcome of those peer observations. If that’s happening with your faculty, if for instance, it’s only senior faculty observing, contingent faculty, it’s going to breed tension across ranks. That’s not something we want out of this process. We want to be thoughtful about who is doing the observing, who is giving feedback, and who is given a voice in this process.

Finally, the last thing that we can see through this process is confusion. When we don’t know what’s going to happen, everybody gets confused. That’s the observer and the observed. If you’re an observer and you’ve been told to go in and write up a report on someone’s teaching, you might not know how to do that. You might not have received any training to do that. And that confusion can lead you to one of two things. One, you write a glowing letter of support saying your colleague is wonderful ’cause you want them to get supported and promoted, or you could be incredibly critical because they don’t teach the way you teach. That confusion leads you to a report that’s not particularly useful for growth. When that happens, everybody gets frustrated. The person on the other side of the fence being observed is confused as well. Why are you here? What is the purpose? What will they get out of it? Defining those parameters is essential to the success of peer observation programs, and that’s what we’re going to talk about in the next couple of segments.