165recalls his frustration in receiving generalised feedback that his lesson was ‘good’
or ‘bad’ when he was a preservice teacher:
[What using the T3] does, which is really powerful, is that we walk the walk and talk the
talk, we talk about the clinical approach to teaching, and we’re asking them [preservice
teachers] to look at data, and that’s exactly what we should be doing and modelling. If we
don’t do it, if we say it’s a good lesson, as a student teacher myself, it used to drive me up
the wall when I was told, yeah it was a good lesson, well, what does that mean?... or a bad
lesson? (Andre, Teaching Fellow)
Numerous participants recognised the importance of gathering evidence during
the lesson and collaborating with the preservice teacher to analyse the observation
records, discussing the evidence together while suspending judgement. Gabriel
found that the approach can drive a less emotionally charged response to a teaching
episode:
I really like it I have to say, but I have to keep reminding myself of the difference between
a judgemental value-laden observation and one that is just evidence, and I like it because I
can go back in the debriefing session with the student teacher and it allows me to distance
myself, and what I feel about what was going on, by putting the data in front of the student,
and we can then discuss it dispassionately and take emotion out of it, and I find that really
useful. It is not easy, and I need to keep reminding myself of what it is I’m doing and why
I’m doing it and what’s my personal opinion. (Gabriel, Teaching Fellow)
The majority of school-based and university-based teacher educators agreed
with Gabriel. They reported that initially they found it difficult to move to a descrip-
tive observation approach because it is demanding to record detailed observations
and that it could therefore be easier to revert to making judgements. Two illustrative
comments were:
Because you’re trying to watch them [the preservice teacher] and you’re trying to write, and
you’re trying to write this non-judgemental stuff ..., so it’s just a lot to do. (Kai, Teaching
Fellow)
I find it difficult to keep up with the pace [of recording] and then I revert to some of the
old judgemental stuff. (Bree, Clinical Specialist)
Echoing Bree, several teacher educators voiced the challenge in recording or
capturing what they ‘see’ in a classroom, while others questioned whether an
observer has the capacity to suspend judgement. Estelle explained:
I think people exercise prejudice and judgement in every perception, in every observation
they make. What they see in the first instance, what their attention is turned to, is prejudiced
by all sorts of things. I don’t think you can observe without judging. (Estelle, Teaching
Fellow)
This was a common reservation, as Frances explains:
I’m actually quite conscious of the fact that I only observe what I choose to pay attention
to. That’s something I often point out to the preservice teacher too, that they notice what
they pay attention to in the classroom. So it’s always partial and it’s always incomplete, and
so there is.... You are making some sort of judgement there. It’s very hard to be neutral.
(Frances, Clinical Specialist)10 Fostering Professional Learning Through Evidence-Informed Mentoring Dialogues...