Video · Teachers Media
Teaching An Observed Lesson
The observed lesson is a peculiar genre — teaching to be seen, not just to teach. Handled well, it's a chance to get useful feedback on your practice. Handled badly, it's a performance that has little to do with your everyday teaching and even less to do with what pupils learn.
About this video
The observed lesson looms large in UK teacher experience, particularly for early-career teachers, and the surrounding culture has been unhelpful for a long time. The temptation is to plan an "observation lesson" — over-choreographed, over-resourced, packed with activities that display "engagement" — that bears little resemblance to what you'd normally do. Observers often reward this, and the loop reinforces itself.
The best advice from experienced teachers and mentors is almost the opposite: teach the lesson you'd have taught anyway, and use the observation as a chance to notice what you can't normally notice while you're teaching. What patterns of participation do observers see? Whose thinking is being heard? Where do pupils drop off attention, and why? A good observer, briefed to look for something specific, is an extension of your own noticing.
The framing that most helps early-career teachers is: the observation is diagnostic, not judgmental. The observer's job is to help you see what you can't see alone — the pupil in the corner who's disengaged, the pattern of who you call on, the pace of transitions — not to grade you on a rubric. That reframing doesn't always match the reality of how observations are used in a given school, but where it does, both teacher and observer get more from the process.
A pre-observation conversation worth having
Before an observation, agree with the observer:
- What are you working on? One specific aspect of your practice, not a generic "please observe my lesson".
- What would useful feedback look like? Where would you like specific noticing — questioning, pupil engagement, transitions?
- What are you deliberately choosing not to do? If you're not going to do a starter for a specific reason, say so.
- Who would you like the observer to watch particularly? A specific pupil, or a specific pair, often reveals more than the whole class at once.
Discussion prompts
- What is the difference between the lesson you would normally teach and the lesson you would teach if you were being observed? Why?
- When you've had feedback on an observed lesson, was it about your practice — or about someone else's idea of what a good lesson looks like?
- If you observe colleagues, what makes your feedback useful to them? What makes it not useful?
Try this in your classroom
- Before your next observation, agree one thing with the observer to look at specifically. Ask them to ignore the rest.
- After the observation, spend fifteen minutes writing your own reflection on what happened before reading the observer's notes. Compare afterwards.
- If you observe colleagues, try giving feedback that is entirely descriptive first ("here's what I saw") before any evaluative comment.