2.2 What are the advantages of peer observation for institutions?
Institutions need to make certain that their students are being taught efficiently and - uniformly important - consistently. Peer observation is a powerful tool for distributing good practice all over experienced personnel. It is also an important way of helping less experienced teachers both to advance their teaching skills and to absorb the shared principles of the institution. The number of inspection personnel in all the municipalities of Kosova isn’t sufficient to observe teachers each year.
English teachers in particular have been observed all the time by non professional staff for their field of study. They weren’t able to receive a real professional feedback then. …show more content…
Whether the evaluations are conducted by peers or administrators, prejudice has the potential to invalidate the results. An evaluator may impose his own beliefs about teaching on the teacher being observed. He may not personally like the teacher or may have unconscious biases related to the teacher's age, gender or ethnic or economic background. If an evaluator is friends with the teacher, this may be reflected in the evaluation as well..
Someone who values strict classroom control and considers the instructor’s presentation to be the key learning object of the classroom may not keep an open mind when observing moments of seeming chaos in a collaborative learning classroom, and vice versa. For this reason, instructors who use peer observations for feedback will need to consider the observer’s assumptions about teaching and plan for multiple visits by multiple …show more content…
Peer observation has been a response to the quality assurance agenda. More recently, the debate has moved towards peer observation as a quality enhancement tool rather than a quality assurance mechanism, with its main objectives being to help academics examine their teaching for the purpose of self-improvement and to establish good practice as a means to enhancing student learning. Whereas quality assurance establishes systems and processes that require conformance o externally imposed standards, quality enhancement aims to achieve improvements in quality by encouraging new approaches to teaching, learning and assessment (Biggs, 2003). Peter Williams
Institutions need to make certain that their students are being taught efficiently and - uniformly important - consistently. Peer observation is a powerful tool for distributing good practice all over experienced personnel. It is also an important way of helping less experienced teachers both to advance their teaching skills and to absorb the shared principles of the institution. The number of inspection personnel in all the municipalities of Kosova isn’t sufficient to observe teachers each year.
English teachers in particular have been observed all the time by non professional staff for their field of study. They weren’t able to receive a real professional feedback then. …show more content…
Whether the evaluations are conducted by peers or administrators, prejudice has the potential to invalidate the results. An evaluator may impose his own beliefs about teaching on the teacher being observed. He may not personally like the teacher or may have unconscious biases related to the teacher's age, gender or ethnic or economic background. If an evaluator is friends with the teacher, this may be reflected in the evaluation as well..
Someone who values strict classroom control and considers the instructor’s presentation to be the key learning object of the classroom may not keep an open mind when observing moments of seeming chaos in a collaborative learning classroom, and vice versa. For this reason, instructors who use peer observations for feedback will need to consider the observer’s assumptions about teaching and plan for multiple visits by multiple …show more content…
Peer observation has been a response to the quality assurance agenda. More recently, the debate has moved towards peer observation as a quality enhancement tool rather than a quality assurance mechanism, with its main objectives being to help academics examine their teaching for the purpose of self-improvement and to establish good practice as a means to enhancing student learning. Whereas quality assurance establishes systems and processes that require conformance o externally imposed standards, quality enhancement aims to achieve improvements in quality by encouraging new approaches to teaching, learning and assessment (Biggs, 2003). Peter Williams