ABSTRACT
Few areas of practice have provoked such heated opinion and emotion amongst teachers in recent years as that of lesson observation. Just the very mention of the word ‘observation’ can cause panic and trepidation in some quarters. This is largely linked to how its use as a reductive form of high-stakes assessment has dominated the way in which most teachers have come to experience observation in the workplace. As dominant and contentious as performance management models have become, they are by no means the only models in use. It would be all too easy to dismiss observation as little more than a mechanism of managerial control based on recent history, but there is growing evidence of it being used much more collaboratively and formatively across the further education (FE) sector. This chapter explores such uses, focusing specifically on peer-based models of observation.
