Classroom Observatory
A teacher-facing agent that notices participation, confusion, and momentum, and that leaves the interpretation of the room with the teacher.
An agent for the teacher, not a score for the student
Classroom Observatory is a teacher-facing agent. In a busy class, attention is scarce. A teacher can miss a quiet student who is stuck because the visible activity is somewhere else. The agent watches for a small number of signals — participation, confusion, and momentum — and offers them as a prompt while the class is still happening.
Participation is about who has had a chance to contribute, not who talked the longest. Confusion is about where an explanation failed. Momentum is about whether the work is moving. None of these is a grade. The teacher stays the person who interprets the room.
What the agent may use
An agent that helps a teacher still has to choose tools and memory. A signal should be something the teacher can act on in the next minute. It should also be something the teacher can explain. Video of faces, keystroke logs, and hidden scoring are outside the brief. If a family cannot understand the sentence that describes the signal, the agent should not collect it.
Teachers shape the instrument
Educators are partners in deciding what counts as confusion in a discussion, which is not the same thing as confusion in a lab. The journal is where those distinctions, and the technical limits of the agent, get written down.