Ms. Bandura Observing The Classroom

With differentiation in mind, I came up with a daily schedule of learning and instruction time for my students. Entry 4 artifact 3 is a copy of my daily schedule and lesson plan format for instructing my students. I begin my day of learning using whole group instruction with a whole group instruction reviewing the calendar, music/movement activity, and read aloud. During these activities, I ask the students question based upon their ability and grade level. The students are really engaged during our introduction. They get to move and meditate to reflect on their day.

My teacher creates an environment of respect and rapport with students by finding ways to ask about their lives. On Mondays, before class begins she asks how everyone’s weekend was and if they did anything fun. The environment of the class is normally peaceful. During class, she often tries to relate the vocabulary to the students. During the food unit, she asked what type of vegetables they eat and which restaurants they go to. Frequently, students pronounce words wrong and my teacher tells the class to repeat it and they can say it right next time.

I consider Mrs. S to be coordinated. She has her materials well labeled and organized throughout her classroom. Her desk area also appears organized. Mrs. S shared with me that she begins her school day one hour before the students arrived. This schedule allows her to plan for the day ahead. Mrs. S‘s classroom is large but functional. She has a total of 30 students in her class. The seating arrangement consists of 6 sets of grouping desks as Mrs. S has 6 groups of 5 students to an area. This set up offers several benefits including encouraging collective learning,

When I do plan my lessons, I focus first on my student’s interests, readiness skills, and learning profile and take into consideration that their interests, readiness and learning profile follows in the content that I teach. I then apply my teaching lessons with various activities to keep their brains active and engaged in the learning

At the end of the lesson Students are going to be able to describe where they live using the verb "vivir" and "tener" in Spanish. During unit two, they been using the these verbs and in the beginning of the lesson they answer the "Do NOw" activity where I asked then: ?Donde tu vives? They answer the question in Spanish and used the verb in the correct tense. After that, they answer a listening question where they had to identify the part of the house using the vocabulary proposed at the beginning of the lesson. Finally, they started a project where they had to create a Floor plan and describe their ideal house. For this activity, they have to use the verb "tener" in present tense. The completion of these activities ensures the acquisition of the new vocabulary and the verbs tense. It is important to mention, that this lesson will continue next week because students need more time to complete their DOL activity.

Between the times of 8:30-8:45, students are arriving, beginning their morning work, and finishing their breakfast. After this, from 8:45-9:10, we have a morning meeting and begin working on phonemes. Then we spend five minutes in a shared reading session. Next, from 9:15-9:30 we work on phonics. After this is completed within this fifteen-minute time frame, we work on interactive reading for the next fifteen minutes. We then start working on math from 9:45-10:50. DSA takes up our next fifteen minutes. Following DSA we do writers workshop from 11:05-11:45, which brings us up to lunch until 12:10, and recess until 12:30. Once the children calm down, we focus on reading aloud from 12:35 to 12:45 and then move into guided reading/centers until 2:00. Taking a break from reading and writing, we work on science and social studies from 2:00-2:35. I then give my kids eight minutes to pack up before the move to a special from 2:45-3:25. The specials they attend alternate daily. Mondays and Fridays, the kids special is physical education. On Tuesday and Wednesday, their special is music. On Thursday, they have art. Additionally, between 10:45-11:15 on Fridays we got to the library. This brings and end to the day as we work on dismissal from 3:25-3:30, and officially declare the end of the school day at 3:45.

Teachers usually use their free time grading and preparing lessons for other days. Shana Myers explained to Cindy Long that “Working Saturdays wasn’t exactly our idea of a great way to spend our weekend - we all have families, errands, and household chores, not to mention grading”(2). Teachers, as well as students, need time to spend with their families and enjoy the little free time they have. “But now that Myers and her colleagues are on a four-day week, they use Fridays as their planning day”(2). This shows how changing into a four-day school benefits teachers by giving them more time to prepare and yet have time of their own. Teachers having extra time to prep for lessons but it's also said that kids having an extra day during the weekend can lead to them not remembering things from the week

S is a 4th grade student who currently uses a resource room (50% of the day). Her attending teachers Thomas, Tomberlin and Wood requested for an OT consultation due to concerns about illegible handwriting and difficulty copying information from the smart board. S was observed on two separate days. She was observed in Mrs Wood classroom during language class. At the start of observation, she appeared to be able to follow classroom rules with minimal verbal prompts for attention to task. After a few minutes she demonstrated inability to sit still on chair and constantly repositioned herself. She demonstrated compulsive behavior for ensuring the words were aligned on table. She was easily distracted by other students and required redirection for attention to task. She stretched forward on table and required verbal prompts to be seated. She demonstrated ability to model positive peer behavior when she was instructed by the teacher to resume task. As we transitioned to the second

The 1988 Educational Reform Act and the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act have shown the need for changes in the educational system and educators are continually making necessary changes in the classroom in order to ensure success for the future of all children. With the many changes impacting the instruction delivered and what students will know or understand from the instruction provided, educators devote more and more personal time into learning and implementing necessary changes in their instructional strategies. Time is an essential component of education. For students, time is spent in the classroom and on nightly homework in order to master skills for their future needs. The teachers’ time is spent mainly providing instruction and the planning for instruction to meet the needs of each individual student, along with continuing their own education in order to improve the educational output of the lives coming into their classrooms.

Conducting classroom observations are very important to the prospective teacher. Observing helps show how experienced teachers manage their classroom. For this observation it was important to notice how the classroom was arranged, how the teacher interacted with the students, the teacher’s management style, and interview the teacher.

My highschool English department was lackluster. It featured four full time teachers, who divided themselves between ELA 10-2 to 35 IB. Between the students, there was an ongoing joke that none of them were actually on the payroll, because half the time they wouldn’t be physically in a classroom, instead could be found wandering about aimlessly. I could never understand why they were all heralded as paragons in their field. They were never there. We once spent 3 days discussing the purpose of trees in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. From a student perspective there seemed to be very little organized planning, and most of it was student directed. Through, from a pre-service teacher perspective, I understand the absence of planning was probably due to us being in an IB advanced class, and part of curriculum design. I also realize now that it is impossible to plan every day out meticulously. There has to be some room for error, or rather room for relaxation. Planning is the heart of teaching (Milner, Milner, and Mitchell, 2012, p.426), but is a constantly changing process. There needs to be structure within the classroom, yet it has to be carefully moderated. There is going to be an indefinite amount of the uncertain and the unexpected. Planning a lesson is like doing a mad-libs. You make the general story, an overall standardized outline, and then

Classroom observation is a main approach of teaching research. Scholars or researchers use video to record the real whole class and observe the teachers and students’ actions, words and the efficiency in the class. Though the observation, they analyze what approach is more suitable. This paper will select video 5 and video 3 as the material to do the classroom observation. Different aspects such as teachers’ responds, questions, instructions notes and students’ behavior will be addressed to analyze the efficacy of this class.

She prepares herself by making copies of all the paper that she needed to give to her students, she prints out the teacher 's guide to love over and review, talk with her co-workers that teaches math as well for planning schedules and PE.

Lesson planning for this unit was and will continue to be strategic and complicated. In order for students to grasp each concept, the concept must be broken down into smaller concepts. Each lesson will have to be well paced, where each lesson does not go too fast and cause students to be overwhelmed and stressed or to slow and cause boredom or irritation. The lessons will include a few accommodations that include many visuals and graphics and the teacher candidate will sometimes write for the students for the writing assignments.

The school I observed in is an intermediate school. It holds students 4th- 6th grade. My initial observations were in a resource room located in the special education wing of our building. We worked with students of all grade levels at the school. We investigated mostly reading and writing assignments but we did dive into a couple math assignments as well. Halfway through the school day at lunch time, my cooperating teacher went to the behavior classroom for the building and acted as another “teacher” or supervisor for the classroom as the paraprofessionals assigned to this room were technically on lunch. We were only in there for thirty minutes a day.