Management Observations: April 25, 2013

Today was a little strange schedule-wise because of MCA's again.  For the math lesson, there were only about 11 students in the room, which changed management a lot (my ELL students and others with specific testing conditions were out of the room).  Space management was not adapted for this, and the students sat at their normal table spots.  The lesson was all direct instruction, so this was alright for the instructional strategy.  It might have been a good idea to have them sit closer to one another for the lesson though, especially for turn and talks or other small partner sharing.  Time management during math was quite tricky: MCA's and getting everyone back in the classroom took way longer yesterday than it should have, and we only had about ten minutes before prep.  Today, my teacher planned a small lesson in which she shared and discussed the results of an experiment the students had done.  There was a thirty minute block, and the teacher only took about ten.  As for behavior...the students seemed very uninterested in the lesson.  There was a point near the end when the teacher wanted a lot of answers in succession and a little bit of discussion (which strongly relates to management of instructional strategies) in which the students were engaged.  However, for most of it they were lying their heads down and dazing out.  I think that, after MCA's especially, turning off the lights to look at a projector screen was probably not conducive to the desired amount of student engagement.

In writing, my students are assembling an anthology of poems.  Today they discussed strategies for revising with a partner, and directions for transferring their edited draft onto their final.  There are many things I could comment on here: details of how materials were passed out, how space was managed, specifics of the transitions...but I instead want to write about something I realized when I was recording observations in the behavior and instructional strategies sections of my template.  A number of times, the teacher needed to redirect either a student, or the entire class.  This is of course expected in teaching, however it seemed that her expectations might have been a little steep.  I noticed the next time that it happened that the directions were somewhat unclear, yet students started working anyway.  A student asked a clarifying question about the directions, and the teacher asked for the students attention again.  Many were in the middle of their task and did not stop as fast as she would have liked.  This turned into a reprimand for the class.  Throughout the rest of the day, I realized that this is something that could be clearer in the initial directions, and that often students are reprimanded for having questions on directions.  Students of course sometimes don't listen to directions and are confused because of behavior issues.  Even so, I felt that directions often came in two or more parts, were too long for students to remember, or were just unclear.  I hope to look for this more in the future to see if it was just sort of an off day for the class, or if this is a pattern.

Question of the day: What is your school discipline policy?  What do you do to follow it, or what do you do instead?
My teacher was in a bit of a rush after school when I was asking her this question.  She said that the school has one, but she isn't exactly sure of it. She said that hypothetically, there is a no tolerance policy, but it is not carried out well.  The school as a whole has a few things in place, including "take a break" chairs for students to sit in during class when they have an issue and need to be removed.  After going to the chairs twice, they are sent to the Buddy Room, where they meet with someone and develop a fix it plan.  My teacher also mentioned that the only person who truly enforces this plan is the principal.  I thought of the question I asked yesterday about respecting adults with one anecdote my teacher shared.  She said that a student swore at the principal yesterday.  The reaction was writing him up and contacting parents on the spot.  This is a reasonable reaction, yet it still brings me back to wondering what would help increase respect for adults with students similar to this one.

Tomorrow I will be: getting to know more about my case study students and thinking about a plan for next week with them; continuing informal observation about the directions and other trends I'm beginning to notice; Annenberg video #2 completed before Monday.