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.