Attitudes of teachers and administrators towards peer observation

ABSTRACT Title: Attitudes of Teachers and Administrators towards Peer Observation Author: Sevil Karabağ Thesis Chairperson: Dr. Bill Snyder Bilkent University MA TEFL Program Committee Members: Dr. James C. Stalker Dr. Hossein Nassaji John Hitz Bilkent University MA TEFL Program Peer observation is a kind of observation in which two colleagues observe each other's classes, take notes and give feedback. The purpose of this activity is to help teachers learn about their own and other teachers' styles, techniques, and class management and apply what they have learnt to be better teachers. This study aimed at investigating the attitudes of teachers and administrators towards peer observation. As a part of the teacher development program, a peer observation process will be implemented at Anadolu University Foreign Languages Department (AU-FLD) in the 2000-2001 academic year. Before implementing such a process, it is necessary to find out teachers' attitudes towards peer observation for the success of the process. Also, the study aimed at discovering if there is a difference between experienced and inexperienced teachers in their attitudes. Forty-eight teachers and 4 administrators working at AU-FLD participated in the study. 26 of these teachers were inexperienced and 22 were experienced. To collect the data for the study, the teachers were given a questionnaire and the administrators were interviewed to discover their attitudes towards peer observation. I distributed the questionnaires to the teachers at AU-FLD and collected them after one week.The questionnaires were analysed using frequencies and percentages. For the open-ended questions in the questionnaire, categorisation was applied. Interviews were analysed qualitatively using categorisation. The results of the questionnaires show that teachers have positive attitudes towards peer observation. They believe that peer observation will be for raising then- awareness in teaching and enhancing their development and want to have peer observation in their department once a month. Teachers would like to be observed by a trainer or by their fellow teachers and think that the observation documents should be kept by the observer and the observed teacher. There is not a major difference between experienced and inexperienced teachers' attitudes. Teachers believe that a training session will be useful to know how to do peer observation. The results of the interviews show that administrators believe that peer observation is useful for the teachers to develop themselves. They would like to implement it once every two weeks and they are planning to have training sessions before starting peer observation. In addition to the observed teacher and the observer, they are planning to keep the observation documents. These two points, scheduling and keeping the documents, are the only differences between teachers and administrators.