Part I - Introduction : Come to Work with Me as a Classroom Observer

What is a classroom observer? What does he/she do? How is this role important? and why would a classroom need to be observed? These might be questions that pop up in your head after reading my title and if you seek the answers to those things (and more), please join me in this post.

Hello again #Education community on Hive! I, aka #nomnomteacher am here but today is a little special since I would not be wearing a teacher's hat as usual. Normally I would post about some of my English classes like ...

Instead, today I want to make a day of "taking-your-readers-to-work day" with me on the day that I go to the classroom as a "Classroom Observer". I'll show you the classroom that I observed and my opinions about that class. So, let's start with what even is a classroom observer and what is one supposed to do.

A classroom observer is someone who sits at the back of the classroom and observes everything that's going on in that class. He/she will be looking at the lesson plans that the teacher of that class prepared and how the teacher facilitated the activity and/or the lesson for the students.

He/She will also gonna be looking at how well the teacher can control and manage the classroom. Most importantly, at the end of the class, the classroom observer will help determine if the students get to learn as they were expected and as planned or not. At the end of the day, there'll be a reflection session for both the observer and the teacher to talk about what to keep and what to improve for the next time.

Easily speaking is that the classroom observer is like an "Outsider's point of view" of the class to make sure that that class is indeed working.

This is me, as the classroom observer, sitting behind the classroom, feeling confident and ready to support the teachers with feedback and ideas afterward.

That day I was assigned to be a "guest/part-time Leadership Development Officer" of a teacher training session at a non-governmental organization here in Bangkok Thailand. My job is to observe the classroom and give needed feedback for these teachers to become better teachers, who can make a greater impact on their students.

I arrived at our training school with one of my colleagues. We were ready to take on this school. LOL This is her with the school sign.

This flag in front of the school shows the air quality indicator. In Bangkok, we unfortunately had quite bad quality air to breathe sometimes. And the worst thing is most of the classrooms in the public school are open windows and use fans. So, the students had to breathe that air in.

Then we had an opening ceremony of the training session. The school directors and team said welcome all the teachers and the team.

Then the staff team greeted all of us and clarified what the team was expecting from these 2 weeks.

And we the Leadership Development Officers were sitting on the side of the room.

Now that the opening ceremony was done. It's time for the classroom! That day I got assigned to observe a first morning class of "getting to know each other". I think before I arrived at the class they already introduced themselves.

This was the first time the teachers and the students met each other and the teachers came up with ideas to play a game to know each other better. The class starts with the game of BINGO. The students were to draw 9 squares on a paper like this and write down the numbers according to the whiteboard.

Each number has a statement and you have to find a classmate that fits that statement of the number. (Here I wrote the translation in English, so you can understand.)

So, now the class goes all-in finding that friend to hit the bingo.

Oh! Someone got it! It's BINGO.

This was just the first activity that I had enough space to write about now. There'll be more activities and some of my feedback from this morning's class, which I want to share with you guys so you can maybe adapt to your classroom.

That'd be it for today. Thank you for staying tuned and coming with me to my job. Hope to see you guys again soon :))

Khob khun kaa,
Nomnomnoodle 🍜