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.