Abstract
The following article describes and analyzes the effects of an observation setting used during the training course provided by a French secondary teacher's education institute. This observation setting should promote students to get prepared for their first professional affectation. Students are successively confronted with teaching situations in a difficult milieu, first throughout video sequences, then through direct field observations. In order to foster their own learning process, students are then invited to describe their emotions, perceptions and reflections on the different observations made. Results reveal the learning potential induced by this observation setting; but they also emphasize the necessity to guide the students' analysing process to foster its contribution to actual professional development.