The Apprenticeship of Observation
You trained for this job as a child. Did you notice?
The apprenticeship of observation is Lortie’s term for the years future teachers spend watching teachers as pupils, which give them a strong but partial, largely unexamined picture of what teaching is.
A trainee teacher in Hà Nội is told to elicit, not explain. Under pressure in her first observed lesson, she writes the rule on the board and drills the class, exactly as her own secondary teacher did. Nobody taught her to do that, or did they?
Sociologist Dan Lortie called this the apprenticeship of observation. In Schoolteacher (1975) he pointed out that, unlike novice doctors or lawyers, new teachers arrive having watched practitioners at work for years; he estimated around 13,000 hours of contact with teachers by the end of American high school. But pupils see the performance from the audience, not from the wings. They watch teachers explain, correct and manage, yet rarely see the goals, planning and after-the-event analysis behind those actions. Lortie argued that what is learnt this way is intuitive and imitative rather than analytical, and that it helps explain why teaching changes slowly.
By the 1990s, language teacher education had taken up the idea. Karen Johnson’s study of four preservice ESL teachers in the United States found them recognising the limits of the teacher-centred models they remembered, yet falling back on them for lack of alternatives. Simon Borg’s (2003) review later brought together many studies showing how teachers’ own experience as language learners shapes their thinking.
The apprenticeship is not destiny, though. Ian Moodie (2016) showed that bad experiences as a learner can push teachers to do the opposite, an anti-apprenticeship. Making these memories explicit, and examining them through reflection, is how teacher education reaches the beliefs they have shaped.
In actionFront stage and back stage
- Trainer
- Think of the best English teacher you had. What did she do?
- Trainee
- She explained grammar very clearly and corrected every mistake.
- Trainer
- And what do you think she was deciding while she did that?
- Trainee
- Deciding? I never thought about that. I just remember what she did.
The trainee remembers the front-stage performance but not the backstage decisions, which is exactly the partial view Lortie described.
In the classroom
- 1
Ask trainees to write a short language learning autobiography, then list three teaching habits they inherited and three they reject, with a reason for each.
- 2
Teach a lesson while thinking aloud at key moments, then explain the decisions behind it, so trainees see the backstage of teaching.
- 3
Before trying a new technique, have teachers predict which remembered model they will default to under pressure, then check a recording of the lesson.
Myth and reality
Years of being taught mean new teachers already understand how teaching works.
Pupils see what teachers do, not why they do it. Their picture of teaching is vivid but partial, so it needs examining rather than trusting, and negative memories can shape practice as strongly as positive ones.
Reflect
Which of your current teaching habits did you learn as a pupil, and have you ever tested whether they work for your learners?
Worth a minute before your next lesson, or a conversation in the staffroom.
SourcesChecked against Crossref and library records
Lortie coined the term in Schoolteacher (1975), a sociological study of American teachers. It entered second language teacher education in the 1990s through work on teacher beliefs and learning, such as Johnson (1994).
Lortie, D. C. (1975). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. University of Chicago Press.
Borg, M. (2004). The apprenticeship of observation. ELT Journal, 58(3), 274–276.
A three-page Key Concepts introduction that links Lortie’s idea to language teacher education.
Johnson, K. E. (1994). The emerging beliefs and instructional practices of preservice English as a second language teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 10(4), 439–452.
Four trainees caught between the teachers they want to be and the models they remember.
Moodie, I. (2016). The anti-apprenticeship of observation: How negative prior language learning experience influences English language teachers’ beliefs and practices. System, 60, 29–41.
Shows that bad memories of being taught can lead teachers to reject, not copy, what they saw.
Borg, S. (2003). Teacher cognition in language teaching: A review of research on what language teachers think, know, believe, and do. Language Teaching, 36(2), 81–109.
Reviews research on how prior language learning experience shapes teachers’ thinking, alongside teacher education and classroom practice.
ConnectionsSee it in the graph
- Communicative Language Teachingnot yet writtenThe kind of innovation trainees struggle to enact when their remembered models are teacher-centred.
- Pedagogical Content Knowledgenot yet writtenThe professional knowledge of teaching that observation from the audience cannot supply.
Know a teacher who’d like this?
Send them the card. It’s made for Facebook, Zalo, LinkedIn and Instagram, and links back here.