Collaborative Observation: Putting Classroom Instruction at the Center of School Reform

By Judith K. March and Karen H. Peters

Book Overview

Helps pave the way for improved student performance, better-designed classroom instruction, and sustained teacher growth.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803968183
• ISBN13: 9780803968189
• Release Date: March 1999
• Publisher: Corwin Publishers
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Teachers helping teachers improve instruction.

It is great to see that a variation of the clinical supervision model developed by Goldhammer & Cogan and modified by John Smyth (now at Flinders University) has been dusted off and polished up by Peters and March. Those of us who worked with the clinical supervision model realised that the term "clinical supervision" was problematic, particularly when applied in schools. To us, CS was a collegial model of pedagogic improvement where the teacher who wanted the feedback on performance initiated the process and this was the tack taken by Smyth who used the model for peer assisted learning.Preobservational conference VCollaborative action plan VIn-class data collection VPostobservational conferenceFigure 1: COMPASS cycle. (Start at top, move to the bottom and loop to the top again).Peters and March have called this four part process COMPASS (Collaborative Observation for Monitoring Practices to Achieve Sustained School reform).The real strengths of the book are that it develops proformas for teachers to show how COMPASS works in the classroom situation, and it gives teachers current research references to support this process. This book is worth purchasing for teachers' reference libraries in schools which are trying to develop a "bottom-up" approach to improving classroom instruction.