Field Experience Blog

Ethical Dilemma During a recent observation, I witnessed a rather jarring incident. It was a third period class, and from previous observation days I had noticed that this particular class tended to be on the rowdy side. It would often take the teacher several attempts to quell side conversations, and the teacher had confiscated cell phones on multiple occasions. On this particular day, the class started out typically, with the students taking a while to settle down before the teacher began reading aloud from  The Catcher in the Rye. While the teacher read, many students played with their phones, completed other work, or simply put their heads down on their desks. It wasn't long before the side conversations broke out again, and the teacher had to speak up. This was when it happened--a student used profanity when directly addressing a teacher. My heart was actually pounding at this moment because I was in disbelief at what had happened. It was like the student related to...

The Importance of Interactive Learning Teaching should be an interactive process instead of a one-sided task. In order for students to be fully engaged, interested, and motivated to learn, they must be given opportunities to personally connect with the material and to share their own ideas. In their book Making the Journey, Leila Christenbury and Ken Lindblom note that, "When we [teachers] insist that all students know--and repeat back to us--minute details, when we place emphasis on senseless tasks or minor aspects of assignments...we set students up for compliant passivity" (136). In order to prevent a classroom situation in which students are passive recipients of knowledge, teachers should aim to create learning experiences that prompt students to think critically and to not only understand the material but to also realize why it matters.  During a recent observation, I really admired how a teacher of an 11th grade class handled a reading activity. At the b...

Fostering Student Independence  For many students, writing an essay is a daunting task. Anxieties over writing can greatly increase when students are expected to compose a full essay during a timed exam such as a Regents. I recently observed a tenth grade English class in which students were assigned a literary analysis paper about William Golding's Lord of the Flies. The students will be composing their papers during class in the computer lab when school resumes after Presidents' Week break. During the class period that I observed, the teacher walked students through the planning process in an organized manner. First, the teacher had students take out blank sheets of paper. Before jumping into the planning activity, the teacher informed the students that they would soon be pulling out central ideas and literary elements from the text in order to find a focus for their papers. She then asked a loaded, deeply-engaging question: " Why are we doing this? Why...

                                  Discussions and Questioning in the Classroom Reflecting back on my observation experiences, I have witnessed both optimal and less-than-optimal class discussion situations. In one not-so-optimal class discussion scenario, the teacher was asking the students to verbally recap events that took place in the novel that they were reading — Mudbound by Hillary Jordan. The teacher went about this very methodically, and was prompting the students to essentially list the events in sequential order instead of asking the students to dig deeper and analyze the significance of these events. The students seemed largely uninterested in this discussion, and the teacher had a hard time coaxing students to volunteer to participate in the verbal recapping. In this situation, the discussion strictly fit a Teacher/Question-Student/Answer dynamic, and the students were not encouraged...

Observing Writing Experiences In a class I recently observed, the teacher provided students with a "planning page template" to plan out an argumentative essay based on a novel that they had been reading.  The planning page template was projected on the SmartBoard, and students also received the template in printed form. The template listed several steps that the students had to address in sequential order. I recorded the contents of the template in my Field Experience notebook, so I will replicate it here: 1. Claim: Restate the question and answer it 2. Text Evidence #1: Use a quote  3. Reasoning: Explain your text evidence 4. Text Evidence #2: Use a paraphrase 5. Reasoning: Explain your paraphrase  6. Summary: Change the wording of your claim The teacher also, verbally, gave tips to go along with this template. He advised the students not to just throw in quotes, but to instead introduce quotes, such as by using, "The passage...

A Range of Experiences in CWC In the article "Re-Seeing (Dis)Ability: Ten Suggestions," Patricia A. Dunn approaches the topic of special education with positivity and optimism. Unfortunately, in some of the CWC classes I have observed so far, the teachers approached the handling of situations involving children with special needs in a less-than-positive manner. In one such instance, I was observing a co-taught CWC class. One of the teachers arranged for the students to partake in an online Jeopardy-style review game that they could access either on an app on their phones or by using the computers in the classroom. The website generated questions about the text "The Hound of the Baskervilles" by Sherlock Holmes, which the students were going to be tested on a few days later.  I thought this activity was a great way to integrate technology into classroom instruction. In Dunn's article, she esteems the use of technology in the classroom and sta...