::OBSERVATIONS::
Reading and Study Skills with Ms. B
[period 4, 2/4/03]
This is a ninth grade elective
class to help students to adjust to the different expectations and skills needed
in high school. When you enter the class, the desks are set up in rows facing
the board. Students are told to get out their folders and “you need to
be in your seats”. Students for the most part are spread out among the
rows of seats so that there are small groups of students located at different
parts of the classroom.
Students are asked to turn to page sixteen of the yellow booklet [“Learn How to Study”] being used in the class. Students complain (perhaps for my benefit) that “this book is boring”. Ms. B. sits on a stool in front of the classroom, reads from the book, and asks questions such as “how is it different to read for fact or fun?”. Student respond with different answers. She refers to the students as “girls and boys”, in responding to disruptive behavior. At one point, she has a problem with a boy student named Steven who responds quite disrepectfully to her. She asks the boy student sitting next to Steven to move his seat or “you’re going to be out of here”. The boy moves his seat but is clearly upset at being picked on and punished instead of Steven. She tells students “ can you stop talking”. The class continues to read out of the yellow booklet. Ms. B picks on different students to read aloud and then answer some questions (mostly factual recall). At one point, Steven asks to go to the bathroom and is again very disrespectful of the teacher. When he comes back, he is very disruptive as he walks slowly and Ms. B actually grabs a magazine out of his hand. One student is sleeping during the whole class. Students comment “It’s boring”, “stupid”, and “I learned this in 4th grade”. Ms. B responds by saying “by the end, you’ll learn study skills” and “pay attention please”. Students for the most part respond disrespectfully with side conversations and lack of attention. Ms. B have the students do an activity where they must write down words that are important in the paragraph and put it into outline form. She reads from the book as students do the assignment. Students work on the assignment which she is going to collect. At the end of class, Ms. B is a lot more informal, easygoing and friendly with the students.
::ANALYSIS::
Before I came to visit this classroom, I had already known that Ms. B was a new teacher at Parkway with limited teaching experience in her past. She seems to be a very unapproachable teacher on the surface, but I think she is a genuinely nice person and cares about the students. In terms of her teaching approach, I think Ms. B does not have many good resources or materials to work with in this class and has not made the effort to make the curriculum more interesting or engaging to the students and for herself. For instance, she did not do any interactive activities or use the board or use visuals (charts/diagrams, overheads/worksheets). It is like she does the bare minimum to do something in the class which I think the students realize. Secondly, I think Ms. B’s classroom management style is quite authoritarian as she talk to the students in a very curt, commanding manner and students for the most part are not paying attention or distracted. With Steven, who is considered a “troublemaker” in other classes, she clearly gets annoyed with him and does not have an effective way of dealing with his behavior in class which is disruptive to other students’ learning. I think this class has the potential for being an interesting and interactive class if Ms. B was take more ownership of the curriculum and the activities planned.