hello and welcome to this new exciting episode in educational assessment uh this will be part one in a series of videos where I talk about assessment I wanted to break these videos down in case um you wanted to you know briefly skip videos or um just really take your time with these videos um so without further Ado um I'll this first video we're going to be looking at the purposes of classroom observation um and I wanted you to really um start to think about you know the different readings maybe even some field experiences and I want you to think about how teachers have been using observation um what sort of positives and negatives that they've been using uh on in how they've been using observation you might have encountered a couple teachers that are very organized when it comes to student observation and you might also encounter some teachers where everything is very informal right and I titled this uh a whole idea classroom observation uh ECE and up because really when most people think about formal observation they're really only thinking about early childhood and I don't blame them I don't blame them it it should be a part of every Early Childhood classroom having formal observation system to go along with all of the other uh standardized tests and and teacher created tests that are out there however we're gonna hopefully understand by the end of this that observation can happen from Early Childhood all the way up and it really should be a part of every teacher's systematic assessment plan and why well um as we know observation is just a way of collecting information right um there are lots of strengths and weaknesses to it um I list a few here for you uh number one observation can be done in an authentic setting you can observe all domains and I really want you to think about this so physical cognitive and social emotional those three domains are enormously important and especially at the Early Childhood level they are going to be the main focus of of what you are observing um and really you know you need to be able to collect really high level information in many cases they're asking for videos and photos you can see different learning styles so you could see whether a child does really well with visual information or a child does really poorly with auditory information this is actually really important again at the Early Childhood level but it can really help you at the high school level if you know you have a child that has difficulty reading for example so seeing some of the information you might have to make extra effort to create pictures or have the student draw models for example um at the Early Childhood level this becomes really important um but children don't have to be able to read and write and typically uh observation is done as part of a naturalistic setting so um children are typically very much unaware that you are observing their behavior and I can tell you from personal experience this is really important from Early Childhood all the way up through high school because many times high school kids when they don't know you're watching they do typically poor Behavior choices and so it's really it's really good to to be observing in natural uh natural natural behaviors in a natural setting of learning some of the weaknesses we might not necessarily align them with specific standards it may not be specific standards that you could observe necessarily so a lot of times it becomes behavior management it can be very subjective so um we are going to go through some do's and don'ts as far as how to conduct objective observations time time consuming they can be very time consuming you can be lost in doing your observations when really you should be thinking about what you're going to teach in the next hour um you can't see mental processes uh you can see Behavior but you cannot see mental processes so that becomes kind of a limit and it definitely requires your focused attention so while you could be thinking about what you're going to teach in the next hour um you really do need to have focused attention uh observing children and it might not give you all the information you need and it's not necessarily supposed to unless you're you're working in a in An Early Childhood Center observation is part of your triangulation efforts um and so at every other level um I just wanted to bring and briefly uh this article by Beatty 1997. um she makes several important points I think are important to bring up here and I'm only going to focus on three of them so number one the one I really want to focus on is um you you are able to make individual plans based on observed needs so conducting observations provides enough evidence for you to you know create those individualized plans so for example I mentioned a child who might have trouble hearing you um you might have to make specific plans provide some written documentation for the child to follow along with what you're trying to teach um there are several other pieces here um I typically really like the idea of resolving particular problems with individual children um observing child behavior at a naturalistic setting really helps you to see how children especially interact socially and as we're looking at more social emotional learning in this world um I really think that that's a really important issue speech and language problems are also a piece of this so um you are able uh as number eight says to gather information for a child's folder as far as placement or whatnot this might also be information for um for developing IEPs so this becomes really important if you are at all in favor of developing portfolios as alternative assessments then observation is going to be key as as evidence that goes into that portfolio so I hope this helps lay the groundwork for observation in the next video we're going to start to take a look at some of the observation methods