Provoking reflective thinking in post observation conferences

Kim, Y., & Silver, R.E. (2016). Provoking reflective thinking in post observation conferences. Journal of Teacher Education, 67(3), 203-219.


The focus here is the nature of teacher talk—here, that talk is described in the context of discussions that occurred between teachers who had been observed in their classrooms and the educators who observed them. The central point that stuck out for me was that certain kinds of talk could facilitate desirable reflective processes, and other kinds of talk could quickly shut reflection down. In the rich examples Kim and Silver provide in the article, the burden was more on the observer-mentors to guide the conversations toward reflective thinking, but the teachers being observed also engaged in some kinds of talk that could either facilitate or shut down reflection.

Though as a teacher educator it was easy for me to apply this to my own experiences with classroom observations, I saw extensions of the findings beyond classroom observations. The kinds of conversations being analyzed here can occur in many kinds of teaching and mentoring contexts. Any time we have one-to-one conversations that focus on the work of one of the two people talking, there are certain kinds of talk that will promote reflection and learning, and other kinds of talk that will shut down reflection and learning, and sometimes will even lead to defensiveness and other negative reactions that we do not necessarily intend.

For example, the findings here helped me think about some of the evaluative and assessment statements I make on my own students’ class projects. I don’t always get the response I desire from those statements, though my intentions are to help my students learn and grow. Reading the examples here helped me think about the nature of my feedback to students and how I might alter it to lead to better learning outcomes. The whole point is to be a bit more mindful about what we communicate to learners—mindful about what we say and what the effects of what we say might be on our learners. It’s about not always being so focused on our own teaching agendas that we miss the cues that learners are giving us and even sometimes truncate their opportunities to come to their own realizations about what they are doing.

In order to get the full meaning of all this, and how examples of talk that facilitated reflection were different from examples of talk that shut down reflection, it’s probably necessary to read the examples provided in the article; brief excerpts I might pull out here could be taken out of context. However, a general pattern in observer prompts that seemed to create walls was a tendency to ask very specific questions about specific elements of the instruction. For example, “What do you think about the end of the lesson?” was a question that shut things down. On the surface, this looks like what I’d call an open-ended question, but it clearly comes from an agenda the asker has, and it can cause the person being asked to quickly think, “Just what does she want here and where is this question going?” One might also start thinking, “Uh-oh—what did I do wrong with the ending of the lesson?” Such responses don’t leave much mental space for professional learning.

On the other side, observer prompts that focused more on the teacher, and on his/her responses, seemed to lead to more reflection. For example, prompts like “I notice you are nodding” or “Why are you shaking your head?” seemed to elicit more reflection and left more room for the teacher being observed to share her/his perceptions of what happened. I also highlighted these observer prompts: “What are you noticing?” and “What are you thinking about?” These seem like potentially fruitful, learner-centered prompts that could help learners discover their own learning. I have used such prompts, but I may want to think about using them more, and about thinking about other kinds of talk I may want to use more—as well as kinds I might want to use less.

It was interesting that in the context of this study, the observer-mentors were not in either an evaluative or a supervisory capacity over the teachers being observed, and their participation was voluntary. Even so, there were certain kinds of talk that point to a feeling the teachers had of being evaluated and judged, and that caused some teachers to throw up walls that impeded their reflection and hindered professional learning. Having to grade and/or evaluate the person being observed would make that more likely to happen, perhaps, but barriers can go up even without that.

Anyone who has ever been observed in the classroom knows that it’s hard to escape the feeling that you are being judged. We teachers tend to put our hearts and souls into what we do with our students, and having someone analyze that can be pretty traumatic, even if the purpose is ostensibly just a conversation between colleagues about our teaching. On the other side, anyone who has ever observed another educator in the classroom knows the pain of watching the other person shut down, and trying to say something to open things back up. The researchers here write about kinds of talk that anticipated an undesired reaction, and also about attempts to “repair” talk that was shutting down reflection.

This article was also interesting because of the methodology being used. Educators have been gathering data on teacher talk for many years now; the idea of videotaping conversations and creating transcripts to analyze is not new. The process of reiterative reading of transcripts, in search of patterns in the data, is also not new; in many ways this research was reminiscent of some of the qualitative research I’ve seen that uses the constant comparative method. What is relatively new here was the analytic processes used. A method called “conversation analysis” was used, which focuses not just on the nature of conversations, but also on the effects the kinds of talk that occur have on the outcomes of the conversation. Conversations seem to be dynamic, reciprocal processes when viewed through the lens of conversation analysis. According to Kim and Silver, these kinds of analyses are relatively new in the educational literature, though these methods have been used to analyze conversations in other professional fields, including journalism (e.g., looking at interview questions and answers) and medicine (looking at diagnostic conversations between physicians and patients).

As a result of reading about Kim and Silver’s study, I’m interested in learning more about conversation analysis. Knowing more can help me become more mindful in my interactions with learners. It also can help me think about those interactions as authentic data that I can capture and analyze as a teacher-researcher.