Field Experience Blog

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...

In many of the classes I have observed so far, teachers utilize SmartBoards in their lessons. Also, on multiple occasions, classes I have observed have gone to a computer lab to complete some kind of web-based activity or an assignment requiring the use of a word processor. During one of my more recent observations, the teacher (who I will refer to as "Mr. G" for privacy reasons) was giving a grammar lesson. Mr. G began the lesson with a Do Now. He projected a series of sentences on the SmartBoard and asked students to choose the correct pronoun from the choices that the students were given and to indicate if the pronoun was subjective or objective. The students were first given several minutes to copy down the sentences in their notebooks and to circle their answers. Then, Mr. G asked for volunteers to come up to the board and circle their answers for the class to see. While going over the students' responses on the board, Mr. G reinforced the material by drawing a T...

So far, my observations have been extremely enriching experiences, as I have gained insights into creative ways to actively engage students in reading and analyzing texts. One lesson in particular that I observed last week really stood out to me, as the teacher had the students analyze supplementary texts and images to draw conclusions about the main text that the class was studying. This lesson took place on a Monday, and the students had finished reading "Of Mice and Men" for homework over the weekend. The focus of Monday's lesson was on the characterization of Curley's wife. The teacher read a racially-charged passage aloud from the text that involved an interaction between Curley's wife and Crooks. After reading the passage, the teacher handed out the poem, "Strange Fruit" by Abel Meeropol, which is about the lynching of African Americans in the South. This poem connects thematically to the passage about Curley's wife and Crooks. The teacher prom...