Strategies to advance the promise of observing teacher–student interactions: Leveraging new methods to increase precision, equitable use, and impact at scale.

Despite their ubiquity and promise for improving teacher and student outcomes, classroom observation systems are imperfect tools. Observational methods can be inefficient, costly, subject to bias, insensitive to individual student variation, and marginally related to student learning gains. These shortcomings limit the benefits of observations for students and teachers. The use and refinement of classroom observations are ripe for next-generation innovation and investigation. This article aimed to broaden and shift how observation of teacher-student interaction is conceptualized, operationalized, studied, and applied at scale. To accomplish this aim, the article advances a research agenda leveraging methods from adjacent disciplines in research using classroom observation protocols as a means to refine and improve those protocols. Candidate methods include real-time sensoring of students' and teachers' neurological and physiological activity within multichannel data collection systems. Using advanced data processing, the information collected from these expanded protocols can help address precision and individualization of classroom observation and facilitate efficient use at scale. This agenda accelerates the pace through which scientific work can increase the precision, impact, efficiency, individualization, and feedback capability of observational methods for improving teaching and learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).