Observation Hours Reflection

I conducted my 10 observation hours at Westmont High School over the course of 2 days. This is also the high school I attended growing up. The classes I observed were an AP Human Geography course, and an American Geography course. What I thought was interesting about theses courses was how different the classes were from each other and how this was reflected in the teachers field specific capabilities. From what I observed the teacher used many different types of texts that were specific to his field of expertise.





The first class I observed was the AP Human Geography Course. At this point in the semester the students were focusing on Folk Culture vs Pop Culture. The class started off with the students watching the opening to the movie fiddler on the roof and were asked to take note on instances of traditional values that appeared in the video. The students used school issued laptops to take these notes and submit them to a class website using google classroom. Taking notes on the video and submitting them was also a great way to embed assessment of the students current understanding of the concept into the lesson itself. What followed was a discussion on what they saw in the video and how it pertained to Folk Culture. He then discussed examples of Pop Culture using a slideshow of pictures that relates to the students current cultural understanding such as fast food, fashion, pop trends, and television. At the end of the discussion, he posed to the class the question “Is the globalization of Pop Culture a good thing or bad thing?". This was a great way to frame the students thought processes to approach future concepts with a field specific mind-set. The final part of the class was watching a video about the Bhutanese culture before and after television was introduced to their society. The student were then asked to approach the video while considering the question about globalization. After the video the teacher walked around the room having the students answer the question by arguing their perspective using the examples they saw in the video.





By modeling this question before the students watched the video, the students were training their minds to approach the contents using a mind-set that is specific to the field of Human Geography. Many Human Geography experts would approach cultural change with the questions, “How did the change affect the cultures values and traditional practices?” and “Was the change damaging, or beneficial to the cultures values and traditions”. This is the exact type of critical analysis that the students were being taught which is really beneficial for furthering their academic career and progression.





The American Geography class was focusing on the Pacific Northwest. The class started off with a Bellinger. “Describe the physical and cultural characteristics of the Pacific Northwest”. As the students worked on the bell ringer, the teacher played the song “smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana, a band from the Pacific Northwest. The students typed away their answers and submitted them to the teacher online. This assessment activity was very important because the teacher was looking at the submissions and had the realization that the students knew little to nothing about the topic. This allowed him to adjust the class lecture to better reflect the current level of understanding of the students. Thus the bell ringer discussion became more of a lecture informing the students of the main points they need to know. Afterwards, the class continued working on a map activity they had been working on since the day before. The activity involve the students being given a blank map of the united states with major roads, cities, and rivers outlined on the map but not labeled. On the back of the sheet was a list of all the names and labels they had to locate and place on the map. They were also given a booklet containing maps of the U.S. with all the labels and locations marked down. The students were instructed to use the map booklet to fill in the labels onto the blank map looking for the word bank on the back. The students worked together on the activity while the teacher walked around the class providing guidance and assistance to those who needed it as well as ensuring that the students were keeping their focus on the task at hand.






This activity was a clear and pristine use of text that is purely specific to the field of geography. The ability to read maps is becoming a lost art and having the students learn this ability is key when approaching the field of geography. Having the students work together on the activity was also very appropriate considering this was more of a skill building activity than a content learning activity. By having the students work together, the higher achieving students were helping the lower achieving students to understand the basics of map reading.

Observation Reflection

My experience in geometry and calculus one classes at Lane Tech was very insightful for my own personal views and learning of potential literacy strategies in my future room. The dynamics of the classroom were all very different and that impacted the way the students were taught, and the literacy strategies used.

The literacy strategies were pretty straight forward and basic in my opinion, but as I saw in working with my mini-lesson and everyone’s strategy presentations it’s a little hard to adapt the more “fun” literacy strategies for some of the needs in mathematics. My cooperating teacher modelled a lot of annotating and mathematical thinking. She would work through a problem and then have the students do a similar problem directly after. Then they would all go over the problem together as a class. During these discussions the teacher would use disciplinary discourse and emphasize the words she used when speaking. She would also ask for student definitions of vocabulary and reiterate both her definitions and the students. This daily repetition of the vocabulary reinforced the students use of it and while they were not always correct in their mathematical guesses, they did use the right language to talk about it. The students also had daily bell ringers they would work on to review what they learned the day before and use mathematical language. She also gave students guided notes to work through. When introducing new ideas, she would use the guided notes and her own colloquial definitions for the students to follow along. The students would then practice the use of this theorem or definition using other things they already learned in class. In some of the guided notes/practice problems given in calculus, she left the definition in the question, so students could refer to it when working on the problem. She also made it explicit what she was looking for which helped students understand what they needed to do and how to grasp concepts.

The classroom dynamics had an impact of the literacy strategies as well. All her classes were set up in to rows and every time students had to work on a problem, they were told they could work with the people around them or by themselves, with occasional group work. In the lower level math classes, the students would simply do their own work and then look at each other’s as opposed to working together. While this is a practice in the discipline (comparing and looking at multiple representations), emphasizing group work is equally important as it works on SEL, ensures math vocabulary is being used, and shows the students that math is hard work and sometimes you need to work with others to understand concepts. In the classes where the students participated, she used more mathematical language and explained more ideas (this is apparent in her first period geometry vs second). Often, the classes that didn’t participate would have punitive measures like homework. You could see the annoyance on the students faces, and in my opinion, it came from the class dynamic. In one class a student didn’t know the name of an absent student that sits right next to her. This was shocking to me as you could see there were some friendships in the class, but not a lot of group work or class activities. This may have been because I only observed for 4 days, but even in the group work there was not a lot of working together in the geometry classes. The calculus classes had more group work and were closer/more talkative groups.

Being at Lane taught me that it’s hard to make a positive classroom dynamic if you don’t do it at the beginning of the year. While the school is a top tier school, it is far too big for my liking. I had the opportunity to sit in on a geometry committee meeting and learned that the department head wanted to get rid of proofs in geometry entirely because it is not on the SAT. It was only teachers in the room, so they all showed their disagreement and found it appalling; particularly when geometry is one of the only high school math classes that uses proofs. Proofs are not just mathematical thinking, they assist in formulating arguments and logical assumptions, which is a skill in life. While the teachers made it seem like that department head probably won’t be around next year, I found it so strange that the HEAD of the MATH department wanted to get rid of proofs for a standardized test and because he thought the students would not use it unless they moved on to be mathematical majors in college. The politics behind being a top tier school are interesting and while the teachers try to make their classes as engaging as possible, it is hard to do in such a large school with so many pressures.

CI Observation Reflection: History

I went and observed at our fellow classmate Patrick Kelly who teaches at Disney II Magent High School, in Old Irving Park in Chicago.
In the context of practices being performed in the classroom was presented in a lecture and follow along format with the assistance of using a projection of PowerPoint notes...the students felt somewhat engaged when it came to reading out loud but when it came to group work or discussion students seemed more engaged with the lesson Not just for the sake of interacting with peers on a personal level but also on a academic level as well...in the lesson there was a focus around key terms such as Capital, Labor, and Urbanization providing a visual example to help describe the term. , There is a reading involving Upton Sinclair reading of "The Jungle" which is about the slaughter houses such as text set analysis activity that seemed to play a role into the ...The environment itself had some students work displayed on the wall along with important notes with words and their definition such as words like: Topic Sentence, Evidence, Analysis and Link. What's interesting that I notice is that there a 4 step process in annotation for students to understand especially with some visual example of what needs to be done. An example of this would be the description of the 1st step says to Circle and add question marks for words and sentence not understood and around the word circle is a literal circle to illustrate a visual example of a part that needs to be done. There are other pieces of information that is displayed to provide references to some topics in different time periods in posters such as the The (American) Civil War, The Industrial Revolution including a timeline of the 1920's and 30's especially one for World War 2 for students to look at as either a preview of the lesson or act as a reminder of the lesson. A video presentation was used to show the modern conditions of cheap work labor being using foreign workers in their country by companies to generate profit. There is a lack of effort to provide a cultural connection however, there is a connection to engage students to the lesson by using interests that they can somewhat relate to. 


SDL- Student Directed Learning is designated time to look at a focus area to work assignments that need to be completed or work on quizzes or projects that need to be worked on during the class time. 

Exit Ticket Question activity: Prompt a question and posed to the students and expected to provide a detailed answer with evidence to support the answer that is covered in the reading from class. The activity would be performed within a laptop. A set of example sentence starters were presented on the projection screen for students that need help to figure out how to introduce your answer.

Taking the time to discuss with the teacher about the disciplinary practices regarding the subject of history it was shared to necessary use of technology within the classroom to conveniently share material for the students but also to evaluate and grade students on the work they complete, basically working on contextualizing the material through a series of questions. During the reading the activity regarding Upton Sinclair the focus was on sourcing when looking at the details within the reading and figuring out the content of the messaging and references being made from the author. This is necessary for students in order to understand the message or point that the author is making. Certain words were being pointed out to clarify for the students that didn't understand but also to simplify key words to support the contextualizing. In a reading, Buehl this would be described as Vocabulary Density. The text structure of the reading was being looked at one section at a time to analysis the point and decode the meaning of what the author of referring to, sourcing was a key focus on that activity.
There was a list displayed on the side boards in the classroom to act as a reminder for students regarding who needs to improve on the effort of work they are doing. This setups a way for students use their meta-cognition 
If not, explain what you saw and what practices may have supported disciplinary inquiry.

Observation Reflection

I did my 10 hours of observation in a sophomore U.S. history classroom at Benito Juarez Community Academy.  The teacher that I observed employed multiple different methods of instruction. In the short time that I was there, I saw him lecture, facilitate small group work, lead class discussion and work with students individually. Furthermore, this teacher challenged the norm of himself as the sole expert in the classroom. He was open to student interpretation and critique of any part of his lecture or content given to students (even if their interpretations did not align with his own.) Not only was this teacher disseminating information, but the discussions that he facilitated and the student-lead activities (such as a tea party where students walked around the classroom roleplaying as different historical figures who had a stake in the Mexican-American War) showed that he believed students brought a lot of prior knowledge and expertise of their own to the classroom. Furthermore, he welcomed students to bring their personalities into the classroom and seldom silenced anyone. There is a norm in schools that student are not a teacher’s friend, and while I see the validity in that statement, the teacher that I observed lead me to question that norm. While students may not be our friends, I believe that it can be ok to develop relationships with students, so that they feel their teacher cares about them, and what they say is not artificial. Furthermore, I think that getting to know students makes us better instructors. This does not make the student and the teacher “friends,” but one of the primary things that I learned from observation is that students are more receptive to you when they feel as if they know you a little bit and you see them as a human being.  

 - Erin Szczepaniak

Field Reflection- Niles North

I did my field observation hours at Niles North High School in Skokie IL. The student demographics of students were 38% white, 9% black, 12% hispanic, 36% Asian and 5% percent-(https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/school.aspx?source=studentcharacteristics&source2=studentdemographics&Schoolid=050162190170002) I observed a civic history class and world religion class. Mr. Amaro taught both classes. I attended his second and third period class. One thing I noticed about his class was that they all used digital literacy. Every student had chromebooks and Mr. Amaro had a smart-board. Niles North is located in the suburb and it is a well off school and had a lot of diversity.
In his world religious class we watched a lot of videos of different religion figures. One video was about Moses, and another video we watch was about Buddhism. He connected the videos to the readings as well. The videos were great for the visual students. After the videos and connecting them to the reading he would have quizzes for them. This was a good assessment for him.
For his civic class he focused a lot of the different government branches including their functions. It was interesting because how passionate these students were about the government and the president of the United States of America. I was able to see who was conservatives and liberals in his classroom. Mr. Amaro also connected a lot of current events to his world civil class. Another practice that Mr. Amaro did was the "who" "what" and "where" worksheet. He was able to have students analyze their readings of the government branches. In addition, he was able to assess what the students learned as well.

In conclusion, I had a great time observing Mr. Amaro class. I really enjoyed how he let the students have a voice and I noticed that many students were very passionate about the content that they were learning. This observation helped me shape the understanding of different practices. It was a pleasure to do my observation hours, at Niles North.

Student Observation Reflection

I observed a freshman high school math classroom and I saw many of the disciplinary practices. They had to do a bell work worksheet of 6 problems and even though they were about different people and different situations, the background math was the same. The teacher chose names and situations that the students may be in with interest and loans. That day was a practice day and the teacher modeled the first problem when going over the bell work. The first one he took his time and said out loud his thinking. Then the next problem he asked a student to answer one part. He kept adding in the students answers until the 5^th problem a student answered the whole thing. Then the students were given a work sheet to compete that was a lot more practice problems. Like I said before, this was a practice day because they all knew what to do without a lecture or reminder of how to do the problems beforehand. This classroom is for students who have trouble with math so a whole practice day would be helpful to these students to get the process down.  Giving them a few situations in word problems also helps them practice taking out the math in the words, so they are able to solve them. It was very interesting to see practices in a real life classroom other than just reading about them. 

Field Experience Reflection

I completed 30 observation hours this semester, at two different schools. 20 of the hours were with a special education teacher, and 10 were with a couple different math teachers (for this class). The schools I observed at were Niles North High School and Sayre Language Academy.  Both of these teachers utilized practices/norms and disciplinary practices in their teaching. The demographic of students at Sayre was 42% African American, 43% Hispanic, 9% White, etc. On the other hand, at Niles North the demographic of students was 38% White, 9% African American, 12% Hispanic, 36% Asian, etc.    

The Special education teacher I was observing, Ms. Kilo, definitely used some of the norms and practices we talked about in class. For example, she had the students, who she wrote IEP’s for, take guided notes. They were learning about solving one variable linear equations. With the guided notes, Ms. Kilo had the students learning the vocabulary necessary to do so. The notes included vocabulary like coefficient, variable, constant, etc. I noticed that after the students became more familiar with the vocab, they were able to ask more questions. Before they were just kind of pointing at parts of the process, they were unable to understand, and it was difficult for them to articulate what exactly it was that was confusing them.

I observed 3 different teachers at Niles North. Two of the teachers used literacy practices and one of them stuck with the more traditional form of mathematics teaching, which was just lecturing and note taking. Ms. Trapani was teaching Algebra 2 honors class and she used most of the 42 minutes by using the projector to project her notes on the board. Students were expected to take notes and occasionally Ms. Trapani would stop and ask the class a few questions to see where they were at. At the end of the class she had students work on an exit slip. Ms. VanRoeyen was another teacher I observed, she used a different method to teach her Algebra 2 advanced class. As soon as class started, she had students work on a bell ringer with a question based on what they learned before. After they finished that, she put up a few problems on the board and had students take control of their own learning by working in groups.