Observation

Yesterday I carried out my pilot investigation. The reason I waited so long was because I wanted to do an observation of a class but needed to wait for the holidays to end first. The class I chose was a musical theatre performance class which involves a group of students rehearsing a musical theatre number from a show to performance level.

I decided I would need to make my observation a simple and structured one because I only had the opportunity to watch one class and therefore didn't have the luxury of waiting for meaning to evolve over time. I therefore started by working out exactly what it was that I wanted to know and concluded that as my interest lies in the balance of musical theatre curriculum I would like to know if emphasis was given to a particular discipline within the class.

I would firstly record how often the teacher gave dance notes, how often they gave singing notes, and how often they gave acting notes. I would also record how often the students asked questions about choreography, how often they asked questions about vocals, and how often they asked questions about characterisation. I hoped that at the end I would have some data that showed whether the class was being taught with a bias towards a particular discipline and whether this rubbed off on the questions asked by the students.

I created two simple grids, one for the teacher and one for the students (I originally thought about doing a grid for each of the students but I didn't know the class well and thought I may get confused with names. I also thought that my interest was more about the bias of the class as a whole so recording individual students wouldn't add much insight at this stage), and each was split into three sections (one for dance, one for singing and one for acting). Every time one of the disciplines was mentioned by teacher or students a mark would be made on the correct box on the grid.

The recording of the data proved to be fairly easy because I was listening out for very specific things and a rehearsal environment is one that I am used to. I am glad I decided on a structured approach because it enabled me to stay focused for the entire class, stopping my attention wandering to more interesting things.

It had been a concern of mine that my presence in the classroom would be a distraction to the students or that perhaps they might change their behaviour. This however didn't seem to be the case. The class is a very involved and busy one so perhaps they just didn't have the time to worry about me. I spoke to the teacher afterwards and he said that they behaved as they always do.

Another thing that particularly worried me was that the teacher, knowing that I was looking at how often each discipline was mentioned, would consciously make more effort to talk about all three so as to seem 'better'. I therefore decided to only give the teacher an overview of my aims rather than the exact specifics of what I was recording. I concluded that this was still ethically sound as the teacher consented and was given the reasons why he wasn't being informed more deeply. I also let him know that he could look at the results after as it might be useful to him.

My real problems came when analysing the results. Looking at my final grid for the teacher it showed that he gave notes on choreography 33 times during the class, he gave acting notes 8 times, and he gave singing notes only twice. The final grid for the students showed that they asked 15 questions about choreography, 2 about characterisation, and 0 about the vocals of the piece.

From the data it looks clear that there is a strong bias towards dance in this musical theatre class but I am unsure if in reality this is true. I remember the first things the teacher spoke to the students about was the importance of characterisation in this particular number, and almost every time he mentioned it he stressed that it was the most important thing. So if it is the most important thing why did he give more notes on the dance and why were more questions asked about the dance? This could be down to a number of reasons. It was early in the rehearsal process and steps were still being learnt so dance was at that point the focus. You have to know the steps before you can layer it with character. It could be that getting everyone to physically do the same thing takes more verbal correction than getting people to discover their character. It could also be that the acting and singing were already at a very high standard because of previous work and now it is the dance that needs to be improved.

Perhaps if I had been able to watch the class over a whole term and seen the process from start to finish then the data I gathered would be more fairly representative of what was going on. I must admit that I didn't find observation to be the most reliable of tools. It is probably due to my inexperience and the amount of time I have to spend on it but I think that the results I got were too open to interpretation. Observation is supposed to be about looking at what actually happens rather than what people say happens which I think is valuable. In reality however discovering what happens doesn't help you discover why it happens so the results are still very open to interpretation.