It's possible for the same user to have multiple roles within a course, but that throws off Canvas when that user tries to do certain actions. I ran into this a few weeks ago when a colleague couldn't do something (I can't remember what it was) that they should have been able to do as a Teacher. I spent several minutes poking around and then saw on the People page that the same user was enrolled as a Student. When I reset their role to Teacher only, that cleared up the problem right away.
If ending up in this situation is a risk for you, I would ask your friendly admins to create a second user for you that can use as an Observer. I am a subaccount admin and a professor at my college, and my friendly admins created a second user for me that I use when I'm doing my admin work (like helping other faculty!).