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.

Field Experience Reflection

    My observational site was Acero-Garcia High School located on the south side of the city. During my time there, I was able to observe is regular World Studies class as well as his AP US American History class. Although we were only required 10 hours, I went consistently for a week to really see the most of the lesson unfold. On the first day, I asked Mr. P about his functions and how he sets the standards for his classes during the beginning of the school year. He explained to me that there is no set curriculum or schedule he has to abide to, essentially his department chair has given teachers free range of their classrooms. Although I feel like I would require more structure, I thought it was amazing that he was allowed to teacher whatever and however he liked. 

    A disciplinary practice pertaining to history I witnessed was analyzing credible sources. The students were born emerged in the digital era, therefore most of their research consists of google searches. While this isn't entirely incorrect, students should be wary when researching on search engines because just about anything can come up. Mr. P warned students to not use blogs, or wikipedia because uncredited people can write incorrect information on those websites. He told students that for this particular project, he would only accept sources from websites that ended in ".edu", ".gov" and ".org", unless he reviewed the websites for them before the project submission.

   In addition to that, Mr. P also explained biases to the students. Just because they have the crediatals stated above (.edu, .org, .gov), their information might be skewed to their beliefs. Due to this, he told the students to not just trust one source, they should continuous fact check their sources for credibility. This strategy is something historians have to do one a day to day basis when they are writing for research purposes.   
   
    Lastly, it was evident that Mr. P set the norm to allow some type of leniency for students to meet deadlines. He said he did not penalize students that contacted him before hand for an extension for up to 3 days after the deadline. He informed me that he accepted late work under this circumstance because he understands the community in which he teaches. Most students have part time jobs after school or siblings that are responsible for, therefore he did not want to harshly penalize any students if they were still turning in assignments and communicating their situation with him. 

Field Experience Discussion

I spent several days observing classrooms at Elk Grove High School in Elk Grove Village. This is a northwest suburb of Chicago, and the demographics of the school are, as written by the school, 41.2% White, 2.3% Black, 43.7% Hispanic, 9.7% Asian, and 2.7% Mixed Races. In the classrooms that I was observing, I was subject to a very diverse group of students that all succeeded in the classrooms even given their vastly different backgrounds. I had the opportunity to observe 2 different disciplines in the site that I was in. 
I first observed English, where the teacher was scaffolding 4-level analysis with the sophomore students. He went over pieces of art and had student lead discussions about each level of meaning in the art with his guidance. They had trouble understanding what is literal and what is metaphorical, so the teacher took a pause and explained what the difference is and I could hear half the class make an "oooooooooohhhh" sound. Once he got past the differences, it became easy for the students to get to the third part, which is psychological analysis. For the fourth level, the teacher started by telling the class the misconceptions that previous classes have had and managed it quickly. He made it very easy for the students to work their way through the four levels and allowed them to take the notes work on using the four levels on the homework assignment itself, so they could have the notes and review while working on the homework. 
The second time I was observing at the site, I was placed into 7 different math classrooms where I got to observe every level of math in the school from 7 different sets of teachers. First, I was in a Calculus AB class where they were doing a slow review in preparation for the assessment the same day. He allowed for the academic success of all the students by doing a very precise review of the type of question they will get on the quiz so that students of all backgrounds had a chance to succeed. The one problem I had was how he asked students to share their scores outloud for everyone to hear. He also asked the students to raise their hands "if you got a 95%, 90%, 85%" and kept going down 5% each time. This practice is not a good way of building confidence in all the students. I feel that he either should have stopped at 90% or never asked the students to share their scores. I know that some of the students who didn't do well on the quiz definitely did not want the people around them to know that, and raising your hand with a score labels them with that score in front of everybody. I will not be taking this practice into the classroom, and I doubt the teacher even notices what he is doing by asking that question. 
The next classroom I went to that required note taking on my part was a high-level geometry class. Due to the overcrowding of honors classes, the teacher told me to not assume that anyone would be successful in the topic and that it still takes a lot of work to get them to succeed. She actually told me to move around the room instead of sitting in one place and had me teach the students as they did a multi-day, less stressful test. The students were tasked with teaching their classmates in their table areas how to do the work if they understand it. The teacher was able to instill an understanding in some but not all of the students because she could not, for whatever reason it may be, get around to the entire room. She kept getting stuck in specific groups that needed help, and couldn't move past the first few tables, which I think is a problem. 
The last class that gave me an opportunity to do any note taking was a remedial level algebra class. This class has a mix of special ed and remedial students, so their were two teachers assigned to a small class of 16. The teacher was relegated to doing examples of factoring for the entire lesson as the other teacher worked with a small group of students at a table to work and catch them up. The students ended the class very confident in their ability to factor, but did nothing besides this. I felt that more could have been done, but I don't know the class enough to know for sure. 
Throughout my experience at my work site, there were not many moments for the teachers to use our courses content in their lessons, but then again it makes sense considering the best teachers in the school told me that they have never used any of the strategies they learned in college. I think that, even though these teachers are the best ones in the school, that there needs to be a healthy middle ground between using strategies and lecturing the course. Maybe they don't even realize that they are using the strategies because they are so far out of the university that it has just become second nature, but I believed what they told me.

Kyle Trosien - Field Experience

During my ten hours of field experience observing the literacy practices in classrooms, there were a number of practices that are a part of the historical discipline that I saw used and emphasized in the high school setting. The whole program, from my point of view, and as expressed by a number of other teachers, was focused on building the disciplinary literacy as opposed to building knowledge. The courses emphasized research, corroboration, citation, and source investigation. The Historical content was used as a backdrop, or a method to be able to teach the students how to use disciplinary literacy skills associated with the higher processes of learning. There were whole summative projects that were focused on the students doing their own research on topics that would be traditionally taught in a lecture format. Some of the teachers very much liked the change to teaching the disciplinary practices as opposed to the content. However, others, namely a majority of the experienced teachers, saw this as a hinderance to the students. While they were learning useful skills, they had little to no knowledge on the subjects themselves. Especially on the aspects of the subject that they were not researching. Another aspect that I noticed in the classes that I visited over several weeks, was that there was a large emphasis on digital literacy in the classroom. Every student had chromebooks, and were expected to be able to use them in the classroom. Every classroom also had a smartboard that was utilized by the teacher. While the use of this was not always mandatory, the use of laptops seemed to be a very much encouraged aspect of the classroom culture. The students had to have their laptops charged and be able to use their computer as well as their digital classroom to be able be successful in their schooling. The most common classroom strategy that was also seen was the use of guided notes for the lectures that did happen or videos. Which this strategy was still about encouraging the skill of note taking considering that the students would be able to use these guided notes on exams and quizzes. Therefore continuing the practice of encouraging skills over the respective content.

Field Experience Observations Reflection

For CI 414, I observed at Maine West High School in Des Plaines over a period of two days. The demographic makeup of the classes I observed were mostly white but also a large minority population, specifically Hispanic. In all the classes I observed, English was the language spoken in instruction. However, there were several ESL students who spoke Spanish to each other before, during, and after class. I observed classes for all grades of high school 9-12 and all different levels from transitional to AP classes. Obviously, the language the teachers used in class differed according to the grade level and the academic level of the students.

            The biggest thing I noticed in my observations with regards to literacy practices was the incorporation of digital literacy into the lessons. Maine West requires that all students have Chromebooks and it’s expected that teachers utilize them into the lesson. Some teachers did a better job than others in this aspect. The best case of digital literacy was in the APUSH class I observed. I was actually in this class five years ago, and the teacher was using many of the same strategies he used when I was a student. APUSH is a very content heavy class that is also very fast paced. And the teacher used digital literacy to keep the class up with the lesson. He showed videos, historical documents, and played audio clips. The best thing he did was show an interactive website that he asked the class to look over for homework.

            There were two classes that I explicitly saw disciplinary specific literacy practices employed. In most classes, instruction was direct instruction through lecture. I don’t know if most of the classes are like that or if I was just unfortunate to observe on those days. I saw disciplinary specific literacy practices in the APUSH and regular US history classes. The teacher in US history provided the class with a great graphic organizer that split up the important battles of the American Revolutionary War. It listed who was involved, when it took place, and the significance of the battle. I thought this was a great thing to do because it made the students look through at the battles through the lens of a historian in explaining the significance as well as contextualizing it with other events. And in APUSH, they were studying Manifest Destiny and the effect it had on the expansion of slavery. The teacher explained how the expansion of the United States was viewed as so important, that both northern and southern states put aside their differences and agreed on this. The problem was that these differences would catch up several years later when southerners wanted to expand slavery into the newly acquired territories. This eventually helped lead to the Civil War. The teacher listed the cause of Manifest Destiny and then several of the effects that it had, both short-term and long-term. Cause and effect is probably one the biggest discipline specific literacy practices in history.

            One thing I noticed in several of the classes I observed was that it was student focused learning; students were teaching themselves about the content and learning more through discussion or another activity. I observed a sociology class that had two Socratic seminars about different topics. The next day, the groups would switch and discuss the other topic. A government class acted out a trial that had to do with learning about the exclusionary rule. I felt these were good ways to promote student engagement, as well as threatening a loss of points if they didn’t participate.

Field Experience Reflection

For my observation, I spent most of my time with one 8th-grade math teacher at Northbrook Junior High. Overall, I think the teacher was knowledgeable in the content area and chose texts, mostly those traditional to algebra courses, that required students to use and develop disciplinary skills. Students had a wealth of individual and collaborative practice with peers in applying what the teacher presented, but there was still too much of a “pedagogy of telling” by the teacher in these classes.

I did see a few general literacy strategies in the classroom to help students read challenging texts. One I found interesting was a collaborative activity done in trios. Somewhat similar to a jigsaw, there were three different texts (word problems that could be solved using single variable equations) divided among the three kids. However, each student only started the work for that text by writing an equation according to what was described. Then they switched papers so that each student commented on and continued the work of their peer. Finally, each student practiced double checking the solution in the final rotation. This was an effective way to emphasize close reading, rereading, and corroboration in a way tailored to mathematics and the specific content of the unit.

Students were given opportunities to grapple with texts individually and sometimes in small groups. Still, it seemed to me that most of the thinking was articulated by the teacher and not the students. She showed great care when explaining solutions to homework or other problems, essentially as Think Alouds. The teacher modeled how to interpret the mathematical symbols, how they related to the prose of the word problems, which operations were needed, and that multiple paths might lead to the correct final answer. But she never allowed students to fill that role.

When the teacher asked for my input, I suggested (cautiously because I wasn't sure how honest to be) that she have the students explain their strategies to the warm-up problems of that day. I think it helped somewhat, but I feel like it was not effective as it could have been because the teacher was helping a couple individual students instead of prompting the student who was presenting. In one section, she noticed that the student had some incorrect steps. The teacher by no means belittled the student for the mistake but fixed the work herself instead of the allowing the student to do so. In fact, I heard the student start to say, “Can I try it again?” before awkwardly standing to the side as the teacher altered the work. I assume the teacher did not hear her question. Altogether, these experiences made me reflect on the importance of planning specific literacy strategies and of being flexible to what we see as students engage with the texts.

Field Experience Reflection- P.Kelly

In enrolling in CI504, I have been able to reflect on my instructional practices and reevaluate my role as a teacher under the Reading Apprenticeship Framework. I have focused on providing more student-centered learning through literacy. The largest change in my delivering of instruction has been the focused on knowledge building and metacognitive practices. Completing assignments such as the text-set analysis and mini-lesson made to reexamine the texts I use in my classroom. I reflect on a text's authenticity, literacy structure, vocabulary rigor, and connection to objectives and essential questions.  With these changes, my goal has been to build independent thinking skills and develop my students reader identities.

        I have found that providing time to build context is key to literacy comprehension. This year for all texts I make sure to have pre-reading activities. For example, to set up a reading on the expansion of modernized industrialization I font loaded the learning and by providing the students with a definition of industrialization. I instructed the students to predict the possible themes and keywords that would connect to industrialization by making a web chart with a whiteboard maker on their desks. To my surprise, I discovered that a large majority of students knew about industrialization and were able to connect major themes and ideas together such as assembly lines, monopolies, corruption, and globalization.  Each group explained their thought process through a talk aloud with provided sentence starters. Before transitioning to the next activity, the student self-reflected on their knowledge of industrialization using the “Fist of five” strategy. I have seen an improvement in my students and transferring the learning between each other and themselfs, instead from the teacher.
In my classroom I have made metacognitive strategies to be the core of my disciplinary literacy instruction. Around the room I have anchor posters that include discussion starters to accountable talk, steps of annotation, Thinking like a historian skills, and SOLAR discussion listening/discussion norms. I find that these foundational skills build off each other in literacy comprehension, academic discourse, and ultimately writing comprehension.  I model these practices and we use them in class. My goal is that overtime students will automatically use these skills without indication and demonstrate higher order of thinking skills

Welcome to US History II

Student created anchor posters on Historical Skills

Field Experience Reflection

For my field experience, I was in a geometry classroom at De La Salle high school. From those 10 hours I observed there, the lessons were very “the teacher lectures and the students take notes on whatever she writes on the board” and that’s that. Sadly enough, the traditional way math classes tend to be taught is in a very teacher-centered manner. I was able to sit down and have a discussion with her about her experience being a teacher for the past 14 years and she actually mentioned this to me. She said how ideally she would like to have the lessons be less focused on her and more on the students, but the reason she doesn't is because it’s time consuming and would take a lot of time away from the content. With the fact that we prepare students to take standardized tests, do we want to teach students content in a way where they will actually comprehend or do we just want to cover as much as possible? Often times, it’s quantity over quality, and that’s what I saw in this classroom.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed my time there and I still like how she taught overall, but I do think more could have definitely been done. She really took the time to stop and completely answer whatever questions the students had, no matter how long it took. She did make sure her classroom was one where the students felt comfortable expressing their confusion and could ask as many questions as they wanted because she would take the time to answer them and break things down for them. During the time I was able to sit down with her, she mentioned how there are moments that made her want to go back to college and take a business calculus course or a physics course so she can expand her knowledge within the world of math and make it more relatable for the students. That’s something I think not many teachers really consider. Also, there were times where she would have the students do an example problem on their own and she would go around the classroom to see how they were doing and checking their comprehension. When it came to the language and vocabulary being used in the classroom, she would write down the vocab word and its definition that the students would copy. That’s about as far as I saw it go in terms of language from the discipline and texts.

From what I saw while I was there, the only texts that were really used were the textbook and worksheets. She would assign problems from the textbook and worksheets as homework, but that was it. Her lecture notes and example problems were ones she took from the textbook or made up herself. I definitely think there could have been a better use of texts like what we've been utilizing and seeing in our course. However for the most part, in this classroom, the entire time was spent copying her notes as she lectured. I never saw her do any activities, show or incorporate any other texts.

When I was in HS, I had a bad geometry teacher and it made me think that it was something I never wanted to teach; however, after observing this teacher and seeing how fun (yes, fun!) it could be, I'm no longer afraid of possibly teaching it in the future. Overall, I enjoyed my time there and I liked the teacher I was observing, but I do think there were better ways to have done things and more that could have been incorporated.

Literacy in action in high school social studies classrooms-Destiny

During my field experience, I was able to sit in on a variety of different classes taught by different teachers. I observed pretty much every teacher in the Social Studies department, seeing core classes and electives. I saw many literacy skills in practice, but what I found most interesting was the teacher's attempts to make their review activities focus on a students literacy. I observed several classes on days where they were filling out study guides to prepare for their test. I noticed that in several of the Modern World History classes I observed, teachers made sure to include images, cartoons, or other primary source documents for the students to reference and analyze. Teachers also asked students to rely on prior knowledge and tested their understanding of the relationship between people, places, and things. For example, during one such review day, in a supported class (one SPED teachers assistant in addition to the main teacher), students were given a chart about important philosophers during the enlightenment, the chart included the name, main idea, and a quote section, some information was given, then students were challenged to fill out the rest of the chart to connect each philosopher to their main idea, and demonstrate this idea through quotes found from texts. I also noticed that in several classes, videos were shown. These videos seemed to function for a variety of purposes, some teachers introduced a unit with them, others ended units with them, and yet others used these videos as the primary source of notetaking. I think this prevalence of videos has a lot to do with the fact that the school I observed at has fairly modern technology, so teachers have the ability to do this. However, in addition to the video, students were given questions to answer, within these worksheets they would be asked to pull main ideas from the videos and contextualize the era they were studying, understand patterns of change, and at the end often were asked to synthesize what they just saw. In another class that I observed, a full SPED class with six students taught by one special education teacher who has a bachelor's degree in social studies, taught his students through inquiry learning. He asked more questions than answers, asking students to really think about what they were learning and letting them guide their learning and get the answers on their own. There was obviously scaffolding for the students, but the teacher was great at taking the better parts of students answers and using their questions and ideas to guide their learning. He asked the students to think about history and question it. Why did certain people make certain decisions? Why did this cause this? Overall, it was a great experience to see teachers using a variety of texts and seeing disciplinary literacy in action. There were times where I wish teachers would have given students time to work more independently with sourcing and contextualization, but since I observed a majority of freshman level classes, it is understandable that these skills were not fully developed, thus not as emphasized.