“”Nice board work.” This was a killer phrase back in the days before the invention of the interactive whiteboard. It normally sat, all alone, in the left hand column of a page divided by a vertical line, under the label “Good”.
The right hand column was labelled “To Think About”. And, even though you were just starting to learn how to teach, you couldn’t help noticing that the number of entries that your Teacher Trainer had made in the “To Think About” section had overflowed into the bottom of the “Good” half, and sometimes even on to the back of the page.
It meant your lesson had been rubbish. Or rather, it meant that your lesson had been judged as rubbish. Because this phrase was, essentially, a code. To a novice teacher, it meant that you had written on the board in straight lines and not made any really bad spelling mistakes. But to the more experienced observer, the code was clear: the lesson was a stinker.
This may be an extreme example, but it does show how the notes from lesson observations do not necessarily mean what they say. Indeed, they will say one thing to one person (or set of people) and something quite different to another.”
Read the complete article at http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk
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