University Tutors' Practicum Observation Notes: Format and content

This article explores one aspect of the supervision of teaching practice during initial teacher education courses, namely the lesson observation notes given by university tutors to their trainees. The format of these notes was found to range from those with highly structured pro-formas to those with more open-ended reporting formats to those with no structure at all. The nature of comments was generally found to fall into four functional categories: descriptive, questioning, evaluative and advisory. The article considers whether format influences content, and shows how the distribution of one tutor's comments among these categories changed when the format was changed. It also considers other factors that may influence tutors' comments.