Quality Teacher Talk

Posted on June 3, 2014 by fullonlearning

In this typically engaging short video piece from Hans Rosling, the world-renowned data visualisation and data-entertainment guru (see his brilliant TED Talks for more), identifies the power of explaining using props. He emphasises that although video can be used to explain some concepts, (see Ted-ED for examples to use if you’re looking to implement some flipped learning in your lessons), nothing replaces the teacher and their ability to make learning fun through the explanations they can offer. For teachers and presenters alike, being able to draw upon a vast repertoire of explaining is fundamental to being able to meet the needs of all learners/ listeners. As a result, there’s a great opportunity to keep refreshing ‘explaining techniques’ and consider the many ways we can employ quality teacher talk to differentiate, challenge and encourage learners to understand new concepts and think in new ways.

I’ve included a screen shot of an observation format I use very regularly for you to have a look at: ‘Explaining – Improving the Quality of Teacher Talk’ The original version plus others that I regularly use, adapt and tweak can be found in “Full On Learning”. You’ll notice that this is a very focused observation tool, as it ONLY looks at the quality of teacher talk in relation to EXPLAINING. Hence it can be used as part of a developmental coaching approach..which is just how I use it.

I use this particular one as part of my pedagogical coaching toolkit. I’ve got others that focus on questioning and a more generic one that looks ONLY at ‘Pupil activity during the lesson’. They’re all developmental in design as they are limited by their focus on a very specific element of pedagogy. In practice, they work as a simple tally sheet during the lesson. You can add additional layers of complexity, according to what the teacher wants to focus on, but my watchword is and always has been to keep it SIMPLE when it comes to observing the complicated world of teaching and the similarly complex world of learning.

The strength of this tool is:

1. When you work with a group of teachers to create and amend the observation format you get into wonderful discussions and sharing of expertise. In fact, it’s at THIS point when you get the really crunchy discussions about ‘quality teacher talk’ and how various concepts can be explained and what else could be used to aid the communication of complexity, of topic fundamentals and of core concepts so that learner understanding is secure.

2. When used as part of a pedagogical coaching programme, the results can be put into a simple spreadsheet to generate a visual chart (Hans Rosling would be proud!). This then forms the basis of your coaching discussion, as it places the focus of the discussion on the teacher, enabling them to reflect and consider their own practice.

3. Coupled with a skilled coach possibly also with video, you get rewarded by by using this as part of a MARGINAL LEARNING GAINS approach and find that you get those sought-after MULTIPLE GAINS from one simple pedagogical focus.

Teacher Explanations and the Quality of Teacher

KEGS Research-as-CPD Marketplace 2014.

Posted on May 24, 2014 by fullonlearning

Great post – thank you for sharing!

teacherhead

Every teacher at KEGS is involved in a teaching and learning group called a ‘workshop’. We meet several times across the year to explore a particular aspect of pedagogy. Teachers select who to work with and what to work on. In May each year we have a non-pupil day that we call a ‘Leading Edge’ day where we run a 90 minute marketplace-style showcase of the work we’ve all been doing in our groups.

The 2012 Marketplace is reported here.

The 2013 Marketplace is reported here.

This year, the workshops covered a wide range of ideas although, interestingly, they were clumped around some common ideas:

Learning texts by heart and reading aloud
Testing and feedback from tests
Using Edmodo as a platform for exchanging ideas and information beyond the classroom
Deepening teachers’ subject-specific knowledge
Lesson Study and IRIS as tools for self-reflection

Following some input in October, the workshops this…

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Teaching-As-Persuasion

Posted on May 24, 2014 by fullonlearning

Daniel Pink’s talk at The RSA discusses how everybody today is involved in some form of selling. We all have to, at some point in our working lives, persuade other people to listen to us, to change the way they are doing things or get somebody else to allow us to do something different from what we may have originally been assigned to do. The art of persuasion is, Pink suggests, akin to the art of selling.

Similarly, every day in every classroom, every educator is engaged in the gentle and not-so-gentle art of persuasion. Of ‘selling’ learning.

From the first to the last bell, educators around the globe are engaged in this complex and necessarily sophisticated act. We operate in a world where goal of the educator is to constantly persuade learners to make a transaction. To give their attention to the lesson topic and to invest their time in doing something different from what they may ordinarily prefer to be doing. Teachers who manage this are rewarded by learners who are motivated enough to chose to invest their time and indulge their curiosity. To explore new and alternative ideas and, in doing so, build their resilience as they stick at the task in which they have been persuaded to engage.

Day in, day out, hour upon hour, succeeding in this is no mean feat.

After all, the task of educating learners out of their own immediate context and into the one that we are persuading them to try out requires us to have expert negotiation skills. We have to convince them that it is worth it for them to jump into the multifaceted world of learning. A world that is full of complexity and unfamiliarity and where for many of them, there is no certainly of success and only small crumbs of comfort in their pre-existing understanding. Just to make it even more perilous for them, this is a world where will be expected to trust their peers. Peers who themselves are either driven or held back by their very own unique uncertainties and fears. And that’s just the first lesson on any given Monday morning.

Pink goes on to say that whilst we are all involved in some way shape or form in the act of persuasion or ‘selling’ as he refers to it, the art of selling (persuasion) itself has changed.

We all know that it is vital to be aware of how the learner feels when we are teaching as we can use this to adapt lessons to accommodate emotional needs in order to sustain their cognitive development. This is just as true, according to Pink, in the context of selling.

But, Pink goes on to say, research suggests that it is far more useful to be aware of what the buyer is THINKING. Pink says that to adapt our persuasive strategies according to what the buyer is thinking results in a far more sensitive and accommodating approach to how we chose to present our ideas and information. In the context of education, this resonates very strongly with what Hattie refers to as the need for teachers to be ‘error seekers’ (there’s more on this on the Marginal Learning Gains blog). This is where we ask not, ‘Who understands this?’ but instead, ask, ‘Who doesn’t understand this?’. This question is a double-impact question in that it produces benefits on two levels.

At one level, it enables teachers to reveal the information they really need to make their teaching the most effective it can possibly be in promoting the best possible learning outcomes; ‘What do I need to do in order to re-frame or re-explain this concept/ idea/ process so that everyone can secure their understanding before I move onto the next topic/ concept/ idea?’. At the second level, it communicates an explicit culture of learning where it’s made crystal clear that it’s okay not to understand it the first, second or even third time. A culture where it is absolutely fine, if not expected, for learners to get it wrong, use this to feed their ‘mistake monsters’ and to struggle at times during the lesson.

There are many more connections in Pink’s talk here with the complex art of teaching, so enjoy the talk, particularly the pen-bit (you’ll see!)…

There’s also a lovely and very speedy RSA Animate Short you can watch here…

The Creativity of Pedagogical Sampling

Posted on May 11, 2014 by fullonlearning

In his Ted Talk, Mark Ronson explains the process of creating his own music through sampling previous music recordings, “I can bully our existences into a shared event…I can insert myself in that narrative, or alter it, even.” He says that this has always been true of music, and that the explosion of technology has simply accelerated and democratised this over the past 30 years.

The #NTENRED Conference last weekend hosted by Huntington School, York, was an example of what Ronson refers to as just such a ‘shared event’. Every one of the 200 who attended and every one of those who watched online, followed the tweets and who have since caught up with post-event blogs have been invited to ‘insert themselves in that narrative’ of the conference-conversation. They are all now in a position to decide how they might ‘alter it’ and decide how to build on and implement what they learnt.

By increasing education practioners’ accessibility to and engagement with, the body of research about learning, there is a golden opportunity to integrate this with individual observations and insights in a balanced and measured way. In other words, practitioners can deliberately ‘sample’ the information they gather from external sources (the body of research) with the information from internal sources (their own practice and context). In doing so, practitioners are empowered to design learning that is directly informed by the existing body of research intertwined with the unique needs of their individual students. They can then tailor their design to their own specific contexts whilst remaining consistently clear and well-informed about the specific changes they want to bring about.

The real creativity in teaching and learning happens when we weave our reflective practice into the rich understanding we can draw from our sampling and fusing of research and practice and in doing so, increase our profession’s collective consciousness. The ‘fresh and new’ that Ronson refers to is that unique mix of our own expertise, the uniqueness of our own learners and the specific context in which those elements find themselves in at any given moment in time.

So by continuing to nurture an on-going dialogue between practice and research, we bring ever closer the day when we can say of education what Ronson says of music,

“…the dam has burst…we take the things that we love and we build on them, that’s just how it works and when we add something significant and original…then we have a chance to be a part of the evolution of that [education] that we love and be linked with it once it becomes something new again.”

Creating Learning Events

Posted on February 1, 2014 by fullonlearning

We’ve had an amazing couple of weeks at school where as a staff community, we have all been part of ‘Operation Challenge-All-Areas’. This has led to some cracking learning conversations both in lessons and beyond with a plethora of ideas being shared daily throughout an always-buzzing school. Our Challenge-All-Areas approach is a way to communicate our determination to our students that they must:

Invest as much as possible in every aspect of their school day

SO THAT

they get as much as they possibly can in return.

We discussed how students’ work is often only ever seen by one person: their teacher. Not only that, when the work is submitted it is within a familiar, comfortable and established ‘expert-novice’ relationship. Where peer assessment is regular, it can often occur once the work is well underway or even as part of the final editing and checking stage. As such, any opportunity to show work to someone other than a subject or class teacher or a familiar peer is incidental and it certainly isn’t something that is explicitly planned for and worked towards in a deliberate way. As such, it misses an opportunity: to create a ‘Learning Event’.

Contrast this instead with the emotional, intellectual and logistical preparation required for an art exhibition, a dance, drama or music performance. Here, the expectations are high from the outset as every participant knows that the final outcome will be seen by an unknown, unfamiliar and potentially hard-to-please-audience. This means that everybody knows that they had better provide a quality experience. Similarly, the preparation required for a school netball tournament or a county cup final, where the stakes are already high in terms of achieving a win or a loss, but even more than this, is the knowledge that the performance will be seen and scrutinised by others…so, again, every team member knows that they had better put in a good performance. This means getting the preparation right, using training to make any adjustments and refinements they need and make sure they are absolutely focused ahead of the moment the first whistle blows.

How differently we all behave and apply ourselves when we know, from the outset, that what we will do will be seen, scrutinised and consumed by others (just think of any presentation or interview scenario). Our frailties, any short-cuts or lack of planning are only a breath away from exposure when we face an audience. So much of our energy goes into making sure those frailties are eradicated as far as humanly possible.

These conversations led us to consider whether we could use the idea of an audience to drive up expectations, raise aspirations and make it clear, from the start, that this work is destined to be viewed by others. All of this also brings into play one of current action research questions: “How do we prepare our students for linear exams?”.

Using the lovely tool of VideoScribe (@videoscribetv) aka the presentation tool for introverts and quiet leaders (!), here are nine ideas for creating an audience of more than one SO THAT you can communicate high expectations from the outset. It is a great way to celebrate and evaluate student work. It involves all students, members of staff, parents and carers in critiquing and engaging in learning throughout the school.

This work follows our most recent INSET day, where staff inspired each other with ideas and approaches showing different ways to provide CHALLENGE. This included taking intellectual risks, supporting students to develop their own learning toolkits and asking every student to reflect on success criteria in answer to a pre-submission question, ‘Is it good enough?’

So the last two weeks have given us the opportunity to be really explicit about our expectations, overt about quality criteria for tasks and deliberate in communicating our desire for students to experience the best possible learning outcomes in every part of the school day.

Operation Challenge-All-Areas starts first thing in the morning. We aim to share a ‘good morning’ with every student on the gate (challenge to connect), design higher order question sequences in lessons (challenge to go deeper) and require students to use quality criteria for themselves to refine, edit and polish work before they hand it in (challenge to meet their own high expectations).

One thing is certain, Operation Challenge-All-Areas is here to stay.

Why we continue to accept the challenge

Posted on January 3, 2014 by fullonlearning

This is a short, snappy post to begin the New Year.

I thought it best to begin with the words of Dylan Wiliam (@dylanwiliam). This is a reminder of the challenge ahead and a suggestion as to why we keep tackling them with open hearts and minds.

Taken from John Tomsett’s inspirational blog, written a while ago,

“Dylan Wiliam, in his keynote speech at the SSAT Conference in December said, Every teacher needs to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better.”

And here, there’s a little more from the man himself, reminding us all about the beauty of teaching…

Experiment: Pop-Up Resource Page

Posted on August 19, 2013 by fullonlearning

I’ve just added a new ‘Pop-Up Resource Page‘ in an attempt to achieve a balance between sharing existing ideas and materials and inspiring ideas that result in improved adaptation. This is an experiment and will have very few resources available to download at infrequent times.

“We liked this…and we did this…”

The ideal impact of this page is that you see something here, like it, tweak it, use it in a different context and let me know what you’ve done. In that way, we grow ideas together and document the process as we go along.

I’m a big advocate of harnessing the power of creation and discussing and thinking collaboratively with those who best know your context to design appropriate resources to enhance learning. As a result, I am always wary of any ready-to-print off-the-shelf materials. The conversation and thinking that goes into the creation of any learning materials is vital.

To begin with, as a result of the requests following the last post here. I’ve added a PDF that should print off in better quality of the graphics of Teacher Standards with an added quote from Hattie.

The collaborative deal:

The deal is that if you find them useful, please leave a comment to say how you used them so others can get even more inspiration from what you do.

Teachers’ Standards

Posted on August 16, 2013 by fullonlearning

I’m doing a lot of work around the Teachers’ Standards at the moment. I’m such a visual thinker and I always love a nice bit of typography, I’ve had a go at creating some graphics to support what I’m up to.

By raising the profile of them and finding ways to integrate them into all things teaching and learning, my hope is that teachers can take control of them and drive and ashape their CPD accordingly.

I’d be interested in how you’re using the Teaching Standards and what you think of the graphics…

TM Clevedon Workshop: Engagement & Courageous Curiosity

Posted on June 15, 2013 by fullonlearning

Here’s what I covered at breakneck speed in my workshop at the most excellent event that was TeachMeet Clevedon. I must apologise to all those who came along as they won’t have realised the risk they were really taking by attending the workshop unless they’ve worked with me before. I really have no brakes when it comes to talking about learning, particularly when I’m running against the clock.

We did go rather quickly.

Sorry, but the pdf of the slides is below if it helps?!!!

Risk is personal

I’ve always been a bit bothered by the term ‘risk-taking’. The subjective nature of exactly what it is that we mean by taking any kind of risk is one thing, but the complexity of what exactly constitutes a risk is another. After all, for some, offering a response to a question in a lesson is the biggest risk a learner will take all term, whilst for others, standing up in front of a hall of 350 people and attempting to hold their attention for any given length of time will be an equivalent risk. These are both demonstrations of courageous learning. So if we can identify exactly what enables them to happen, then we can deliberately design this into lessons to ensure all levels of risk taking behaviour becomes more frequent.

So when considering practical strategies that might encourage learners to adopt risk-behaviours (the outcomes we want to observe), we have an opportunity to explore and deliberately design the conditions that need to be in place (the input) that will encourage risk-taking learning-behaviours. It is here that we can direct our energy, our planning and interventions, to the very heart of learning design.

What is ‘engagement’ and where does it come from, anyway?

Learners are brilliant at picking up on teacher-speak. We will often hear and read what we consider to be highly self-aware comments from them such as, “I need to be more motivated in (subject)” or “I need to be more engaged in my (subject) lessons”. The thing is that it doesn’t always follow that learners share the same (or any) understanding of what this actually means*.

*When asking a Year 8 pupil what they enjoyed about a lesson they had just had, they replied to me, “Miss always does plenaries.” As you can imagine, I was delighted with this response. When I asked what it was about these that they liked so much, they replied, “That’s the bit where we get to pack up.” I am sure I’ve written about this before, but it does a great job in demonstrating the gap between teacher-speak and learner-understanding.

Taking the time to work out exactly what behaviours we want to see in practice so that these can, therefore, be deliberately encouraged, actively observed and frequently reflected back to learners will go some way to bridge the gap between what we say and what we expect to see. Not only that, it provides us with a lovely opportunity to instigate some top-notch learning conversations that will hand over the responsibility for learning to the learners. So if we can communicate exactly what we mean when we ask for more ‘motivation’, ‘independence’ and ‘engagement’ then we can deliberately design it into learning opportunities. Not only that but we can then ask learners to reflect on whether they think they are showing it (because they know what they should be doing to show it) and in this way, we can mutually celebrate it when it happens.

Seeking out what we want to see

So, when working with a group of teachers recently on an initial enquiry question, “How do we encourage our learners to take more risks?”, we took all of the above into account and ended up re-drafting the question to look something like this:

By doing it like this, we ensured that the focus of the research was specific and connected the key concern or issue of engagement with the outcomes we wanted to observe. This question could have been taken even deeper by looking at a few selected learners in one group over a limited period of time such as 20 minutes over the course of x3 lessons but this sufficed for the purposes of the enquiry at this point.

Reflection

This probably should be another post but as I’m here and I covered it at TeachMeet Clevedon, I’ll keep going…

The S3 is explained in another post on the Marginal Learning Gains blog. As is the 4Ts here and in the book.

The 4Rs of reflection

The 4Rs are all about structuring reflective sessions so that they are meaningful and full of purpose. They come from breaking REFLECTION (another one of those big catch-all teaching terms) into some definite component parts. In doing this, we can select a specific element of reflection we want learners to practice. Learners are then clear about the expectations of what they need to actually do during a ‘reflection activity’ and, therefore, what ‘quality reflection’ looks like, i.e. the specific learning behaviours are being encouraged.

The elements of structured reflection could be as follows:

To REFLECT (through dialogue with and feedback from somebody else)

To actively REVIEW (independently of anybody else)

To REFINE (make adjustments & improvements either independently or in response to feedback)

To RETRY (to attempt again, acting on suggestions, ideas and suggestions received from others)

Or, it could be a combination of two of these that then lead into the goal setting and COMMITMENT elements of taking responsibility for learning…

The ‘C3’ of ‘Commitment to Learning’

The C3 approach to goal-setting and next-steps is simply another way to break down the how learners can be actively encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning. This is the actionable part between,

‘This is where I need to be…

AND…

‘…so this is what I WILL do to get there.’

This gives learners very specific things that they can do to get them to a point where they can make a commitment to the goals and targets that they have set for themselves.

To CONSIDER what they have reflected upon (see above) and hence the feedback, reflections, ideas and suggestions from listening to, seeing the work of and learning from others
To CONSULT with those (within or beyond the immediate lesson setting) who may be able to give advice, share examples and suggest ways forward
To COMMIT to a plan of action and the goals that the learner has formulated

All of this is a long preamble to the PDF of the slides I used in the TeachMeet Clevedon workshop which you can read and download below:

Zoë Elder 13June2013 TMClevedon FullOnENGAGEMENT

Even Better If we specifically focused on What Went Well

Posted on May 27, 2013 by fullonlearning

Over the past few months, I have been fortunate enough to work in a wide variety of contexts around the country with fabulously open and highly reflective practitioners. Of late, I have been involved in engaging and often very challenging debates around the ways in which all forms of observations are used in schools to improve the learning experiences of young people.

One of the main areas of my work is concerned with how to develop and sustain a safe and effective culture of quality professional reflection. An integral aspect of this involves the design of dynamic professional development programmes that integrate a culture of coaching, action research and developmental lesson observations.

This includes:

the constant testing and revision of all observation formats
clarification of the purpose of all observations
agreement of the intended and expected outcomes of all observations
reflections on the language for and of learning
creation of a range of observation tools (different tools for different purposes)
systems that reflect and embrace the values of truly developmental and highly reflective professional learning

An often neglected area of the process of all forms of observation is the post-observation conversation*. In establishing a culture where developmental lesson observations are used to develop the quality of learning opportunities alongside and not instead-of or as separate-from judgmental or graded observations, the challenge is to find the most effective way to ensure that every post-lesson conversation is about professional learning and not professional telling.

Quality post-lesson conversations

The conversation following any type or style of learning observation can, and should, make as many of the demands on the professional expertise of the observer as on the practitioner whose lesson has been observed. This is just as true for a developmental lesson observation as it is for a graded / formal / judgemental lesson observation. It’s certainly true that just because there’s no grade to be given doesn’t make the complexities (practical, emotional and professional) of the discussion any more straightforward.

We can employ as much reassurance as we can think of in the form of…

‘It really IS developmental, there are no judgements here’ OR…

‘Remember, I’m not using the criteria to form any judgements in this, so don’t worry’ OR…

‘The lesson observation format I’m using doesn’t allow me to look for evidence that could be used to grade the lesson’

…BUT until a reflective and developmental culture is established (and even after it is), it is worth remembering that it is likely that it may always feel, for the person whose lesson has just been observed, that the ‘grading elephant’ is present in some guise in the room.

This is particularly true at that critical point of the commencement of the post-lesson conversation when the crowd of learners have packed up and their backpacks have disappeared towards their next lesson. For most, it is worth noting that this is when heart rates spike again, for both the observer and practitioner. It is at this point that the sophisticated skills of the observer have to be fully deployed into the situation, immediately and expertly.

Scorpion feedback

A typical structure of much of our feedback conversations with learners involves providing some positive reinforcement and actively noticing some elements of effective practice followed by some ‘points for development’. This is often encapsulated as ‘What Worked Well’ and ‘Even Better If’ or ‘Two Stars and a Wish’ AfL-style feedback. At other times, it comes in the form of a ‘feedback sandwich’, where the effective element is followed by a developmental point and finished with another effective element. This structure has been adapted by many schools for observers to use with practitioners as part of the post-lesson conversation. The actual structure has many merits, whichever version or adaptation is used.

What I have been reflecting on most recently, however, is the relative impact of the effective elements (WWW) against the impact of identifying the (WWW) developmental points.

It’s a bit like going to a gallery to see an exhibition and finding pieces of art that we really like but noticing that the weather wasn’t very nice.

What often happens is that the person receiving the feedback does’t really listen to the WWW, however fabulous these are because they are waiting for the EBI. So whether there is a formal judgement hovering and waiting to be delivered or simply a non-graded developmental EBI, or both, the ‘EBI’ can still act as an unhelpful sting in the tail of the conversation, regardless of how massively positive the impact of learning has been as a result of the WWWs. And however accomplished the practitioner has been whilst employing these WWWs.

One of the main reasons for this is:

(1) The WWW and the EBI are often, although not exclusively, presented as two very separate, distinct elements of the observation.

(2) The source of these separate elements is often very different. This is because the process of identifying the elements of effective practice and the elements that we would consider as goals for development, even during the lesson itself, tends to involve an entirely separate search.

So the observer might see…

(1) (WWW) The lesson structure is clear

(2) (WWW) The Learning Outcomes & Success Criteria were communicated effectively to students

But identify…

(3) (EBI) The teacher-questioning didn’t encourage expansive answers from the learners.

All three points are really important, but when this particular post-lesson conversation occurs, there is a danger that all the practitioner hears is point (3) and leaves the lesson thinking, ‘My questioning isn’t good enough’. In doing so, they may fail to acknowledge and or even care that their planning was really effective and that the construction and communication of learning outcomes and success criteria ensured that all students knew why, what and how they were learning throughout the lesson. These elements may constitute two things into which they’ve invested huge amounts of time and energy and with this, elements of practice that another practitioner two doors down the corridor would really benefit from seeing in action. But they leave the experience thinking, ‘my questioning isn’t good enough.’ and add this to the infinite ‘to-do list of a self-imposed ‘must-do-better’ mindset.

The M.O.T.** and avoiding the STING

So, in implementing Marginal Learning Gains Theory, the observer has the opportunity to be as meticulously selective as the reflective practitioner for whom they are observing the learning. In doing so, they can identify a specific area for development directly from the effective elements already in place. This means that the onus is on the observer to make a clear and specific connection between the elements of the lesson that have been effective and identify how more of this will enhance the quality of the learning experienced. This also means that as observers, we have to really up our game in making a highly sophisticated professional analysis of what really needs to be ‘grown’ from existing practice that will make the biggest impact on the quality of learning.

Obviously, in a coaching relationship, the options for what to focus on in terms of growth are identified and prioritised by the practitioner, but the elements from the observed learning presented by the observer still need to inform and enhance the depth of this conversation.

So, here’s one very simple strategy (and yes, it will very soon be appearing as a Marginal Learning Gain) and the bonus is that is has an equally transferrable application for peer and self assessment activities with our learners.

The fear of the EBI (Elephant Behind the Insight)…or something like that.

When the MOT leaves us knowing we’re on track and have the skills already in place to keep going…

* I am deliberately not referring to the post-lesson observation conversation as ‘feedback’ because in doing so, it still feels like I’m describing something that is predominantly a one-way process. This is regardless of how much we insist upon the need for there to be several feedback channels where the ‘loudest’ feedback channel is that from the ‘learner’ (or the practitioner’s lesson being observed in this instance) to the ‘teacher’ (the observer in this case).

**And yes, this means I have a new acronym (because I really don’t think we have enough in education).