I want to write this for the teacher, not the school leader. If you are the person being observed — the one who saw the email, felt the knot in your stomach, and spent the evening before rethinking a lesson that was perfectly fine until someone decided to watch it — this is for you.

Most teachers have been that teacher. Most have taught lessons under observation that were better than their normal teaching because they over-prepared, and lessons that were worse because the anxiety of being watched stripped out the spontaneity that normally makes the lesson work. Most teachers have performed for observers. Most teachers have dreaded them. Most teachers have, at some point, taught a lesson they thought was a disaster and received feedback that described it as strong. The disconnect between how the lesson felt and how the lesson was judged is disorienting. It makes you wonder, not for the last time, what exactly the observer was seeing that you were not.

Years later, having spent as much time observing as being observed, I think I can answer that question. And I think the answer matters — not because it will eliminate the anxiety (it will not; teaching is personal and being watched is inherently uncomfortable) but because understanding what a good observer is looking for might change your relationship with the process.

It is not about you

This is the hardest thing to internalise. When someone walks into your classroom with a notebook or an iPad, every instinct you have tells you that you are being judged. Your performance. Your competence. Your worth as a professional. That instinct is not irrational — observation has, historically, been used precisely that way. Graded lesson observations, which persisted in England until Ofsted formally moved away from them and which lingered in informal practice for years afterwards, trained a generation of teachers to associate observation with a score. And a score, however carefully it is dressed in developmental language, is a verdict.

But the best observation is not about you. It is about what is happening in the room — the interaction between your teaching and your pupils' learning. A good observer is not sitting at the back thinking "is this teacher good?" They are thinking "what are the pupils doing right now, and is it helping them learn?" The distinction matters. The first question puts the teacher under a spotlight. The second puts the learning under a microscope. They are not the same thing, and the second is considerably more useful to everyone involved.

When a skilled observer conducts a learning visit — formally or as part of a walkthrough cycle — the useful question is not an overall impression of the teacher. The focus is on specific, observable practices. Is the teacher checking for understanding, and if so, how? Is the questioning open or closed, and what happens after the pupil answers? Is there feedback being given, and is it specific enough that the pupil knows what to do next? Are all pupils participating, or are the same three or four dominating every exchange? These are not subjective impressions. They are things that can be seen, described, and — critically — discussed with the teacher afterwards in terms that are specific enough to be useful.

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What good observation captures

The research on effective teaching is remarkably convergent. Rosenshine's Principles, Hattie's work on visible learning, Black and Wiliam's formative assessment, Alexander's dialogic teaching — all of these point to a set of observable classroom practices that are associated with pupil progress. Open questioning with wait time. Modelling with think-alouds. Scaffolding with gradual release. Retrieval practice. Explicit strategy instruction. Specific, task-focused feedback.

None of these are mysterious. Most teachers do most of them, at least some of the time. The value of observation is not in discovering whether you do them — you almost certainly do — but in capturing the detail of how you do them. Because the detail is where the quality lives, and the detail is almost always invisible to the teacher themselves.

You cannot, while teaching, simultaneously notice that you waited three seconds after your last question but only one second after the question before that. You cannot, while circulating during independent work, notice that you spent seven minutes with the pupils on the left and forty seconds with the pupils on the right. You cannot, while giving verbal feedback, hear yourself saying "well done, great work" twelve times and "your use of evidence in that paragraph is strong because you connected the quote to your argument" once. These patterns are invisible to the person producing them. They are visible to someone watching. That is what an observer is for.

When the observation captures these details — not as a judgement but as a description — the feedback conversation becomes something genuinely useful. Not "your questioning was good" (what does that mean? how would you do it differently?) but "you used six closed questions directed at volunteers in the first half, and two open questions with cold calling and wait time in the second half — the quality of pupil responses was visibly different." That is information you can act on. It tells you something about your practice that you did not know, described in terms you can understand, and connected to a specific change you could try.

What bad observation looks like

Bad observation exists. It is not malicious — almost nobody observes a lesson with the intention of making the teacher feel worse — but it is common enough that most teachers have experienced it.

Bad observation captures impressions rather than evidence. The observer walks in, watches for fifteen or twenty minutes, forms a general sense of whether the lesson was "good" or not, and writes a paragraph of prose that could describe almost any lesson in almost any school. "The lesson was well-structured. Pupils were engaged. Pace was appropriate. Questioning was used effectively." This feedback tells the teacher nothing they did not already know. It is the observational equivalent of a participation certificate.

Bad observation is inconsistent. Two observers watch the same lesson and produce different accounts — not because one is right and the other is wrong, but because neither has a shared framework for what they are looking at. Robert Coe's work on observation reliability confirms what teachers have always suspected: that the lesson you are judged to have taught depends significantly on who is doing the judging.

Bad observation does not result in feedback. I have lost count of the conversations I have had with teachers, in my own school and elsewhere, who were observed weeks ago and have not yet received any feedback at all. The observation happened. The box was ticked. The development conversation — the only part that could actually improve anything — never took place. When this happens, the teacher learns something, but not what was intended. They learn that the observation was not about them. It was about compliance.

If you have experienced any of this, I want you to know that the problem is not you. It is the system. And the system can be made better — not by eliminating observation, which would remove one of the few mechanisms through which schools can understand their own practice, but by making observation specific enough to be useful and consistent enough to be fair.

What you are entitled to

I believe that every teacher who is observed is entitled to know, specifically, what was seen in their classroom. Not a vague impression. Not a grade. Not a paragraph of generalities that could have been written without entering the room. A specific, evidence-based account of what practices were observed, what they looked like, and what the research says about their likely impact.

You are entitled to feedback that is prompt — within 48 hours of the observation, not after the holidays, not after the next reporting cycle, not never. Evidence that sits in a notebook for three weeks is not evidence. It is a memory, and memories degrade.

You are entitled to feedback that produces a cognitive response rather than an emotional one. Wiliam's phrase is the right one. You should leave the feedback conversation thinking about your practice — "I did not realise my wait time was that short; what would happen if I extended it?" — not thinking about yourself — "am I a good teacher? does my line manager think I am a good teacher?" The first response changes what you do on Monday. The second changes how you feel on Friday.

You are entitled to know that the same framework is being used for every teacher in the school — that the observation of your lesson is comparable to the observation of your colleague's lesson, conducted by the same or a different observer, using the same language and the same criteria. Consistency is not bureaucracy. It is fairness.

And you are entitled to see the evidence yourself. The observation record should not be something that is written about you and filed without your knowledge. It should be something that is shared with you, that you can interrogate, and that forms the basis of a professional conversation between equals. Where schools make shared records the expectation rather than the exception, teachers engage with the process differently — and the difference is substantial.

Why it matters to you

Observation, when it is done well, is one of the few mechanisms that can show you something about your own practice that you cannot see yourself. Teaching is an activity performed in real time, under pressure, with thirty variables competing for your attention simultaneously. You cannot watch yourself teach. You can reflect on what you think happened, but reflection without external evidence is limited by the same blind spots that produced the practice in the first place. A good observation, captured with specificity and shared with respect, is a mirror. It shows you what you actually do, not what you think you do. And that information, uncomfortable as it sometimes is, is the raw material of professional growth.

I built Learning Lens because I wanted that mirror to be sharper. Not a funhouse mirror that distorts what it reflects, and not a blank wall that reflects nothing at all, but a clear, specific, research-grounded account of what happens in a classroom — described in terms that make sense to the teacher, connected to the evidence base, and structured in a way that makes the feedback conversation productive rather than performative.

If you have been observed and felt that the process was pointless, or unfair, or disconnected from your actual practice — the problem was not that you were observed. The problem was how. And that is a solvable problem.

Jamie Scobie writes from extensive experience in Scottish secondary education, including pastoral care, data for improvement, and school self-evaluation. This blog is an independent publication: he writes in a personal capacity as the creator of Learning Lens, writing about classroom observation, teaching evidence, and education policy. He speaks here only for himself and for Learning Lens, not for any employer or other organisation. He holds an MSt from Cambridge (Distinction) and a Masters from Stirling.