Observation manuals in Classroom Research serve many functions. They identify features for describing key aspects of classroom teaching and learning assumed to be critical for the quality of the activity that takes place (e.g. students engagement; students learning; teacher–student interaction, content coverage, disciplinary demands etc.). They also provide a common language to describe important aspects of teaching. Looking across classroom observation manuals scholars agree on that they might differ in thematic focus, grain size, subject specificity, and dimension of teaching and learning they capture as well as views of learning (BMGF, 2012; Biesta & Stengel, 2016; Casabianca et al. 2015; Gitomer et al. 2014;, Klette & Blikstad-Balas, 2017). For the latter - views of learning and dimensions of teaching they capture (or not capture) - this is obvious an issue of normativity – however seldom discussed as such. In this paper we discuss issues of normativity in classroom observation manuals focusing on three aspects of normativity, that is i) normativity at the level of conceptual framework/ concepts that are included (or not included) in the manual; ii) normativity at the level of scoring and rating procedures, and iii) normativity at the level of community of researchers As highlighted in this symposium – these normative aspects of ‘the craft of research’ - are seldom discussed or made explicit within the educational research community but are embedded in communities, subcultures and ‘tribes’ specific approach or stance to a certain phenomenon, or cluster of phenomena. Despite the fact that there is a need for fostering consensus and agreement around key elements that are to be pursued within a program of research or community of researchers in order to make knowledge aggregation possible (e.g. classroom discourse features; sociocultural approaches to learning, inquiry methods etc.) there is also an urgent need to critical examine conceptual frameworks and assumptions underlying these frameworks - including what is included and what is left out. In this paper we will examine a cluster of different coding manuals (PLATO, FFT, CLASS etc.) and discuss how their conceptual framing and decompositions into specific codes and elements together with accompanying coding procedures might privilege some aspects of teaching (e.g. sociocultural aspects of teaching versus cognitive/ behavioral aspect of teaching) while others are ignored.

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