Making teaching visible through learning opportunities 

To the untrained eye, classroom instruction often looks better than it really is. For example, if the teacher seems friendly, students seem engaged, and the activity proceeds smoothly, a novice observer might judge the lesson to be a success. But in fact, those may not be the best indicators of quality instruction. A more seasoned observer, turning a more practiced eye on the very same classroom, might find that while the teacher and the students seemed perfectly happy and got along with each other, the lesson was not well-designed and did little to teach the intended concepts. 

The question is, what does it take to observe teaching in ways that yield truly valuable insights? We argue that one needs to bracket off the more superficial aspects of instruction, focus on the quality of the learning opportunities provided to students, and gauge the extent to which those opportunities are aligned to the lesson’s specific learning goals. 

In a high school science lesson that one of us (Ermeling) observed, the learning goal was to understand how dissolved oxygen levels affect biological activity in aquatic environments (Ermeling & Graff-Ermeling, 2016). Specifically, students needed to analyze how oxygen levels vary in different bodies of water (e.g., a tropical sea vs. a mountain lake) based on complex interactions of climate, salinity, water movement, and the surrounding ecosystem.