Comm - Field notes/observations PDF

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Field notes/observations...

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Communication 114 Fall Semester 2016 Professor K. Aguilar Observation Field Notes, Part 2 Points Possible: 30 points Due: Thursday, October 13 no later than 11:59 pm (on Blackboard in a Microsoft Word document) During your classroom visit, write your observations on Criterion A, B, and C. Type your responses directly into this document (in italicized font). Provide descriptive examples that support your response and illustrate the learning environment you observed. Criterion A The Physical Setting 1. Discuss the demographics of the classroom (e.g., sex, race/ethnicity, ability, etc.). The classroom was mostly evenly mixed between Hispanic and white students. There was only one African American student, one Middle Eastern student, and two Asian students that I could tell. Sex was split evenly with fourteen boys and fourteen girls. There was one student with severe ADD that is on medication, and the teacher placed many quiet peers in that group. Mostly, student ability was spread evenly; as I walked around, I noticed there were advanced students sitting next to struggling students. None of the children’s clothes seemed tattered, so it’s difficult to tell socioeconomic status, but I know at least one student is living in a hotel because of something he wrote in an assignment. I did see one student wearing a turban, so it’s plausible to assume his family is religious, but I’m not sure about other students because I didn’t see any signs or hear anything from other students. 2. Draw a classroom map.

3. How did the arrangement of the classroom/learning environment influence communication patterns? The table groups left room for collaboration and discussions among the 4-6 students facing each other. However, because the desk clusters were so close together students were not afraid to turn around and talk to the people right behind them. When the teacher was talking, a lot of students had to turn around in their chairs, but when the teacher talked for a long time, the students wouldn’t bother turning around and would just listen. They seemed to lose focus after a while and start poking at things on the desk. I don’t think this arrangement was very effective because those students had a hard time seeing, and it lost their focus a lot. However, I think mostly when she talks to the whole class, she brings everyone over to the rug on the side of the room in front of the projector screen. Over there, noisy students often sit in the back where they feel they can talk more. The girls tend to gather toward the front while the boys are in the back and edges. The boys sometimes try to sneak in the front, but the teacher usually stops them by telling them there isn’t enough room and their squeezing is pushing the girls out of the way. Criterion B Evidence of Motivational Strategies and Engagement 1. Describe the strategies the teacher used to engage the students in the academic content. During the lecture at the projector, she engages them with questions that engage them with questions. Sometimes they’re prompting questions to see how much they remember: “Do you remember how last week we talked about ____?”, sometimes they’re rhetorical to point their attention to a certain aspect, “See how this is here?”, and sometimes they’re an informal assessment, “Did the greeting go at the beginning, middle, or end?”. For the informal assessment questions, she picks a different student for each question but gets the whole classes’ opinion to see if they agree with that student’s answer. She also has a pointer stick that she sometimes lets the ‘picked’ student use to point out their answer on the board (in the cases that the question is being displayed on the board): this is an extra motivation for students that like the attention. She doesn’t make very many jokes, but she made a few self-deprecating remarks that the children laughed at. She makes a lot of associations to students’ personal lives and experiences. Especially in writing, she encourages students to write about what they know and associate what they read about with things they’ve seen. 2. Describe the interaction patterns among students and between teacher and student. Mark the low, medium, and high participators on your classroom map. *The medium students are striped colors, but the high and lows are marked by color- see key on classroom map.* Talking was pretty mixed. There was one all-quiet table, which I think was a purposefully orchestrated by the teacher because a student at that group has severe ADD and, therefore, trouble focusing. He wasn’t very talkative while I was there, but that might be on account of having quiet table members. On another note, I noticed that just because a group had talkative girls didn’t mean that it had talkative boys; the girls weren’t purposefully drawing the boys into the conversation. The same dynamic applied to talkative boys not making a point to draw in quiet girls into the conversation. I also got the feeling that some students could have been loud or quiet, but because they were around other students that were loud/quiet they followed their peers’ examples. The students marked with stripes are those students that I felt could have gone either way. With the teacher, students felt very comfortable talking to her, but they were good about not yelling out for her attention. She uses ‘classroom sign language’, so students have to raise particular fingers in order to communicate what they want to talk or ask about. When she’s in reading groups with them, they don’t have to do this unless she’s talking to someone else. Also, when she’s walking around the room they don’t have to do this unless she with someone else. 3. In what ways did the teacher exhibit immediacy toward the students? I noticed a lot of immediacy in Mrs. Papaleo while she was working with students in groups and when she was walking around

the room. She is very approachable at all times, and the students are relaxed in asking for her help. Just like the textbook refers to, she smiles at students when talking to them and to signal when they get an answer right, she looks them right in the eyes, she leans towards them (and not just to hear them over other students talking), she leans down to be closer to them and to signal that they have her whole attention, and she has a relaxed and open body posture. She is also immediate by being constantly available to students; she has a ‘classroom sign language’ chart, so that when students need the teacher for a particular reason they give a certain sign. She uses this sign language to respond to students faster and to know when she needs to pause a lecture because someone has a question about it (versus when someone is going to ask for a restroom break). She sees her students as people as well; not only does she know all their names, but when they come in from recess, I see her ask how things went with personal questions. She knows all their names, and despite only being in class with them for a few months when I first observed the class, she already knew things particular students liked to do at recess. 4. How did students respond to the teacher? Provide illustrative examples. Students were very respectful towards the teacher despite being rambunctious second graders. She has made her classroom policies very clear- posters on the wall detailing ‘classroom sign language’ that has different signs/fingers raised for different things students want. She has several 5. Note the interaction similarities and differences between males and females with the teacher. (Tally or count the number of times males and females interact with the teacher or in the classroom). I lost count a few times, but my general tally was Males: 36 Females: 25. I didn’t count the interactions for the time she spent in a reading group with five males, so I think the tally would have been more distinct if she’d spent the whole time walking around talking and/or lecturing. I also counted behavioral corrections in this tally, which I think distorted it a little because I noticed she would correct the louder males first and look to go correct the girls, but the girls would hear the boys get corrected and immediately quiet down for a minute. The teacher did give them the stink eye (nicely- an “I’m onto you”) when she did that, so I felt some of the communication could have been implicit more than it is with the males. It was interesting though that she never started by correcting the girls even if they were being just as rambunctious as the boys. On the few occasions she corrected a girl for disruptive behavior, they were a lot less likely to argue and try to convince the teacher they actually weren’t misusing their eraser as a toy. When the students raised their hands to answer questions, I saw a pretty even distribution between boys and girls on average, but the boys’ hands went up faster than girls’. Girls took a pause and/or weren’t always as enthusiastic. This falls in line with what the textbook says about girls being more cautious about getting an answer wrong while boys are more competitive and quick. While walking around the classroom to observe work, the teacher did address males on their work more than girls, but only slightly more. Criterion C Evidence Cultural Responsiveness/Accommodations 1. How was culture addressed, recognized or celebrated in the classroom? There were two sets of self-portraits displayed with student writing on the walls. I think that celebrated the uniqueness of the students themselves and was creating a sense of all the students being equal. Also, many of the stories on their bookshelves were about visiting different cultures, took place in other countries, or had a wide variety of ethnicities in them. 2. How did the teacher respond to different ethnic groups in the class? She appeared to respond to each ethnic group the same. The kids were all mixed in together in table groups, reading groups, and social groups. She used an online video to give an introduction to an assignment, and the video featured a cartoon African American child. There was also a book the class read to base a journal response off of, and it was about two friends; one was white and the other Asian. This information

tells me that the teacher is not afraid to represent different ethnicities in the classroom. 3. Describe the ratio of males to females in the classroom. On your classroom map, note where males and females were seated. The male to female ratio was 14:14, which I thought was interesting that it was split so perfectly. She kept the table groups mostly evenly distributed on boys to girls except for the two groups with 2:4 ratios. 4. What communication strategies or accommodations were used for students with special needs? (You might discuss the strategies and/or accommodations with the teacher after your observation.) There was one student with ADD that is on medication. He is allowed to get up and walk around the room to different areas and not sit with the class. The teacher says he can focus pretty well on both tasks and lectures if he isn’t required to sit in one place the whole time. She also said the medication has helped him stay calmer than he was when the year first started (it’s a new medication). It seemed to work because he was engaged, on task despite moving positions in the classroom every few minutes with his clipboard or tablet, and was paying attention enough to ask the teacher a clarification question about a lecture. 5. Provide specific evidence of how the teacher demonstrated culturally responsive teaching or how the backgrounds of the students were represented in the curriculum. There was a reading lesson where the class read a book and had to analyze it. Each table group analyzed in different ways; one group was supposed to make connections to their own lives (one student had seen a swamp like the one in the story), another group was to find the most interesting part and/or their favorite part (one girl liked the part when they were skipping stones because it’s something she likes to do). There is culturally responsive teaching in that there is a representation of different cultures in the things the class reads and the different ethnicities represented in the class. This affirms the validity of different cultures and gives confidence for students who identify with various cultures. 6. Was the teacher aware of the learning styles of the students? Provide evidence that supports your response. Mrs. Papaleo did a good job of covering a broad range of learning styles. For example, when they started their pen pal letters, she explained the activity in several different ways by drawing connections from a narrative activity they’d already done, using a video and lecture to explain how the parts of a letter work, and had students stand to give answers to questions about the video. She let students pick where in the classroom they wanted to sit while writing. After the group activity was over, she walked around to give individual instruction. She kept the classroom quiet while still letting students work with friends if they wanted. She encouraged some students to draw with their writing to express themselves. She gave long term goals (field trip at the end of the year) and short term goals (getting a letter back from the pen pal). She gave students plenty of time to write, but still a deadline; she makes students go into recess time on assignments if they have dawdled. I don’t always agree with taking away recess time, but that in itself is a motivation for procrastinating students. For students that are fast with their work, she has a list of other weekly tasks for students to work on when they’re done with something. She told me that tablets help a lot in reaching different learning styles. Especially with math, students can pick the game they like best- and that’s usually the game that teaches them the most. Also, games on the tablets are fun for kids, so it doesn’t feel like busy work. They are also a motivation for free time and behaving appropriately to keep the privilege of having them....