As a peer observer, you might think your primary role is to help your colleague improve their teaching. And while that’s certainly one outcome, the transformation that occurs through peer observation is far more expansive and reciprocal than you might imagine. Conducting an observation can be a transformative experience for you, too. When you serve as a peer observer, you don’t simply witness someone else’s teaching—you engage in a process that will fundamentally reshape how you think about and practice your own teaching.

This chapter explores the transformative power of peer observation from three interconnected perspectives: the transformation you facilitate for your colleague, the transformation you experience yourself, and the mutual transformation that emerges when two educators engage in genuine dialogue about teaching. Understanding these dimensions will help you approach your role as observer with greater intentionality and openness to your own growth.

The Transformation Your Colleague Experiences

As an observer, you’re uniquely positioned to watch the students while your colleague is focused on delivering content. You can notice: Are students genuinely engaged, or merely compliant? Are they grappling with concepts, or just recording information? When your colleague posed that challenging question, what happened in the students’ faces? When the explanation began, did you see understanding dawn or confusion deepen?

During your post-observation conversation, you might ask questions like:

• “What do you think students were thinking during that section?”
• “How did you know they understood that concept?”
• “I noticed several students had puzzled expressions—did you catch that?”
• “What were students doing while you were demonstrating?”

These questions help your colleague see their teaching through a learner-centered lens. This transformation in perspective can have a lasting impact, changing how they approach everything from lesson planning to assessment to moment-by-moment instructional decisions.

When you provide positive feedback to your colleague on their teaching, you offer more than pleasantries—you provide professional affirmation that what they do matters, that their efforts are seen and valued. When teachers receive positive feedback on teaching, it results in an increased sense of confidence. That confidence may lead to more experimentation with novel teaching methods.

This creates a cycle: Your affirmation helps your colleague feel secure in their foundational teaching abilities. That security gives them the courage to take pedagogical risks—to try that new active learning strategy, to restructure a lesson in ways they’ve only imagined, to experiment with different questioning techniques.

The Transformation You Experience as Observer

You may be surprised that as you observe others in action that it will cause you to reflect on the impact of your own teaching. As you watch your colleague teach, questions will naturally arise: “What am I doing to impact my students? How might I adopt some of the teaching strategies I’m observing? Where do I have room to improve as a teacher?”

This is the mirror effect. Your colleague’s classroom becomes a reflective surface in which you see your own teaching more clearly.

You might find yourself thinking:

• “How do I handle distractions? Do I address them directly like she does, or ignore them like I usually do?”
• “Do I pause after the questions I pose, or do I rush to fill the silence?”
• “What’s my ratio of talking to listening? Watching him, I realize I probably talk more than I think I do.”
• “When students struggle with a concept, do I respond with patience or frustration? Seeing her gentle persistence makes me wonder about my own reactions.”

The answers to these questions can transform both how you think about teaching and how you “do” teaching. This isn’t abstract professional development—this is watching real teaching and having your own practice illuminated in the process.

Each observation you conduct sharpens your ability to notice what matters in teaching and learning. You become more attuned to:

• The subtle signs of student engagement or disengagement
• The dynamics of classroom climate and rapport
• The pacing and flow of a lesson
• The effectiveness of different questioning techniques
• The relationship between teacher actions and student responses

These enhanced observational skills don’t stay confined to your peer observation work—they transfer directly back to your own classroom. You become more aware, more present, more able to read the room and adjust in real time. You develop what some call “classroom peripheral vision,” the ability to notice small moments that matter while keeping the bigger picture in focus.

The Mutual Transformation: Growth Through Dialogue

When doing the “work” of teaching—managing grading, attending meetings, preparing lectures, responding to emails—it can be easy to just get it done as opposed to thinking about and questioning what works and why. We become practitioners on autopilot, repeating patterns without pausing to examine them.

Your role as a peer observer helps move teaching and learning to the center of the discussion. These peer-to-peer conversations about teaching take both you and the person you’re observing back to the “root” of the what, why, and how of teaching. Together, you re-engage with fundamental questions:

• Why do we make the choices we make in the classroom?
• What are we really trying to accomplish with this activity or that approach?
• How do we know when learning is happening?
• What assumptions are we making about students and learning?

These conversations pull you both out of autopilot and back into intentionality. You’re no longer just doing teaching—you’re examining it, questioning it, refining it. Both of you emerge more thoughtful, more deliberate, more connected to the purpose underlying your practice.

Summary

As a peer observer, you are not separate from the process—you are fully immersed in it. The observation changes you as much as it changes your colleague, perhaps more. Your own teaching transforms through the act of observing, through the discipline of articulating what you see, through the practice of engaging in genuine dialogue about teaching.

The invitation, then, is to approach your role as peer observer not as a service you provide but as an opportunity you embrace—an opportunity to deepen your own practice, to build meaningful professional relationships, to contribute to a culture where teaching matters and where every educator is both teacher and learner.

When you observe your next colleague’s class, know this: you are participating in something transformative. For them. For you. For the students you both serve.

References

Southern California University Career. (2024). The Transformative Power of Effective Communication in Every Aspect of Life. https://career.scsuniversity.edu/2024/03/19/the-transformative-power-of-effective-communication-in-every-aspect-of-life/

Newman, L.R.. Roberts D, Schwartzstein. (2012). Peer Observation of Teaching Handbook. Shapiro Institute for Education and Research at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DqxsTVjm2Gb414NAcCy4wWkoKuStgJ3Z/view

*The author wrote the original draft of this work and used Microsoft Copilot and Claude AI to assist with revision and proofreading.
Microsoft. (2025). Copilot [Large language model], http://copilot.microsoft.com
Anthropic. (2025). Claude (v3) [Large language model] http://claude.ai.