From peer to peer: an opportunity to improve observers' professional development

Higher education teaching and learning in Europe faces challenging times and deep changes, largely dueto many reforms originated by the so-called Bologna process (Moore et al, 2008; Leite, 2007; Vieira,2005). What is a good professional is a question that gets, nowadays, other meanings when someonetalks about teaching. The objective of this paper is to present the results of a training + research projectthat was proposed by a Teaching and Learning Lab (TLL) set up jointly by the Faculty of EducationalSciences (FPCEUP) and the Faculty of Engineering (FEUP) at the University of Porto. Its underlyingstrategy aims to improve the quality of teaching and the quality of learning, and at the same time tocapture information about teaching and learning practices used within the university. As teachersevaluation process faces, at least in Portugal, new approaches and operative trends, it was research team intention to distinguish those two processes and when Peer Observation Teaching ( POT) experimentwas launched, its main and unique purpose was to promote teachers training; through the peer reviewmodel of POT, which emphasises the POT formative effects both to the observer and the observed.Specifically, this paper wants to argue the idea that POT is an opportunity to improve observersprofessional development.The organisational model underlying this training + research project was based on teams with fourelements, two from Educational Sciences and two from Engineering. The observation grid was adaptedfrom several models used in European Universities and in its second part adapts a model from F. Vieira(Vieira, et al., 2004). The first section covers class-related topics, namely "organisation", "presentation","class mood", "content", and "awareness and flexibility". The second section asks the observer tocompare the observed class with his/her own classes, offering the observer four leading questionsaddressing observation subjects that were not covered by the closed response items: 1) What was moststriking? 2) What questions ...