Observation Skills For Effective Teaching Gary D Borich

What Actually Happens When You Try to Observe a Classroom

I spent three years doing formal classroom observations before I stopped making a complete mess of it. The problem isn't that people don't pay attention. It's that they pay attention to the wrong things and record them in ways that turn out completely useless when you're trying to actually improve teaching practice. Borich's system at least gives you a scaffold that forces you to separate what you saw from what you think about it, which is the single hardest habit to build. Here's the thing nobody tells you about observation skills for effective teaching Gary D Borich: the most valuable part isn't the recording categories. It's the discipline of writing descriptive statements instead of evaluative ones during the observation itself. Everyone knows this intellectually. Very few people can actually do it in real time while someone is teaching fifty students in front of them. I still catch myself writing "the students were disengaged" instead of "three students were looking out the window, one was sleeping, two were passing notes" and then having to go back and redo the whole record because the evaluative statement tells you nothing about what to change.

Observation Skills For Effective Teaching Gary D Borich

Borich's framework breaks down into a few distinct but connected pieces. There's the distinction between descriptive and evaluative recording, which I already mentioned but bears repeating because it's the foundation everything else sits on. Then there are the specific behavioral categories you track — teacher verbal behaviors, teacher nonverbal behaviors, student responding behaviors, and student status behaviors. Each category has subcategories. The whole system is designed so that you can later code what you wrote and get a quantitative profile of the lesson. The recording instruments matter more than most people realize. Borich provides specific forms like the ABC recording sheet, which stands for Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence. You write down what happened just before a particular behavior, the behavior itself, and what followed. This replaces the vague memory-based summaries that most teachers produce after an observation. A teacher might remember "the class was chaotic during group work" but the ABC record would show exactly which instruction preceded the chaos, what the chaos looked like in behavioral terms, and what the teacher did next to try to manage it. That's usable data. The vague statement isn't. There's also the interaction matrix, which tracks the flow of communication between teacher and students in a grid format. You note who initiates and who responds, whether the exchange is correct or incorrect, and the nature of the teacher's response. This reveals patterns that are completely invisible when you're just sitting in the back of the room taking notes in paragraph form. You might discover, for example, that you ask questions to the whole class but only call on three students by name throughout the entire forty-minute period. The matrix makes that visible.

I ran into a specific problem with the ABC recording method once that illustrates why flexibility matters. I was observing a teacher running a seminar-style discussion with graduate students — no desks, no textbook, just people talking in a circle. The ABC framework assumed a traditional classroom setup where antecedents were clearly teacher-directed instructions and consequences were visible behavioral changes. In that seminar, the antecedents were student comments, the behaviors were other students building on or challenging those comments, and the consequences were shifts in discussion direction that took five to ten minutes to become apparent. I spent the first twenty minutes frantically trying to force observations into the ABC columns and producing garbage. What I ended up doing was switching to a modified narrative record that tracked the discussion flow chronologically while noting key interaction points. Borich acknowledges that no single instrument works for every situation. The framework is a starting point, not a straitjacket. I wish more people read that part of the book. Another counterintuitive thing about this: more observation doesn't automatically mean better teaching. I watched a colleague go through an intense observation cycle — six lessons observed over three weeks with detailed feedback after each one — and his teaching didn't improve meaningfully. The problem was that the feedback was all evaluative. "You need to give more wait time." "Your questioning technique is too narrow." Those statements are correct but they don't tell you what to do differently. The lessons where he improved the most were the ones where the observation data showed specifically which students he called on, how long he waited after each question, and what types of responses he received. Concrete numbers replace vague advice every time. The biggest limitation of Borich's system is that it requires significant training to use properly. Reading the book takes a weekend. Learning to reliably distinguish descriptive from evaluative statements takes months of practice with feedback on your recordings. Learning to use the various instruments accurately takes longer still. Two observers watching the same lesson will often code the same behavior differently if they haven't calibrated their interpretations against each other. I once had an observer and I disagree on whether a particular student behavior was "on task" or "off task" and we spent twenty minutes arguing about it afterward. The student was doodling in the margin of their notebook. Whether that counts as on task depends entirely on whether you consider parallel cognitive engagement as valid participation. Borich's system doesn't resolve that kind of judgment call for you.

There's also the issue of reactivity. Students and teachers behave differently when they know they're being observed. This isn't a flaw in the observation method — it's a fact of human behavior. The standard workaround is multiple observations spread across time so that the novelty effect wears off and you start seeing more typical behavior. One observation gives you a snapshot. Three observations across a month give you something closer to a pattern. Six observations across a semester give you data you can actually trust. If you're going to use this framework, start with the descriptive-versus-evaluative distinction and practice it until it's automatic. Record one lesson using only descriptive statements — no judgments, no interpretations, just what you saw and heard. Then compare it to a second recording where you allow yourself to evaluate. The difference in usefulness between the two records will be striking. After that, move on to the ABC recording and the interaction matrix. Don't try to use all the instruments at once. Pick one, master it, then add another. The download link situation is straightforward. Borich's book "Observation Skills for Effective Teaching" is widely available through standard academic publishers and bookstore channels. The recording instruments in the later editions include printable forms you can photocopy. Some university education departments also post sample recording sheets online. The specific forms — the ABC sheet, the interaction matrix, the category coding sheets — are what you want to locate rather than just reading about the theory. Theory without the actual recording tools attached to it is about as useful as a map without a compass.

I'll leave it at that. The system works if you put in the practice time. It doesn't work if you treat it as a checkbox exercise and move on to the next thing. Classroom observation is a skill, not a procedure.