Reflection Paper On Observing A Classroom

OBSERVING a classroom

One of the drawbacks of being a teacher is that you never really get a chance to observe and learn from the other excellent teachers around you. This year, I have had the rare opportunity to observe excellent teachers daily. I was happy to be able to use observation as an option for this coursework. This forced me to take a deeper look at what I was watching, and it also provided me the opportunity to evaluate the teachers with a handy new tool! During the past 6 weeks I have observed three English classes at Placer High School: Resource English 12, English 11 and English 9. Although all of the teachers were competent and fun to watch, the only teacher that followed the SIOP protocol (or at least much of it) was the

The teacher did an amazing job of creating background information, helping to make connections, and motivating students. I was especially impressed with how well she was able to engage all her students even though they were at different academic and emotional levels. Her use of videos to help the student learn how to analyze text for rhetorical devices was great. It was engaging for the students, and it really made them think about the rhetorical devices and apply them to a situation. After practicing on videos, which was fun, the students had a pretty good grasp on the rhetorical devices which made it much easier for them to analyze texts. Since reading is difficult for all these students, it was a very effective method for learning the concept. This teacher’s methods would also work for EL students with few adaptations. The teacher provided a lot of practice using different techniques to make the concepts clear, however, if these students were ELs, she would have needed to focus more on vocabulary. For the most part, she helped the students with key vocabulary words as they came to them in the stories they read. If she pre-taught the vocabulary, it would have been more meaningful when the students came across the words in the text. The only other change that I would make is that I would have posted the content and language objectives and reviewed them with the students. I asked her about objectives, and she

The teacher did not use many of the SIOP components, but he is nonetheless a very effective teacher for nearly all of the class. He effectively provided his students with background information before the class began writing their essays. He also broke the essay into chunks so the students could easily understand the requirements, and so that they could focus on learning the elements of an essay and apply their knowledge to future assignments. He used a variety of internet resources with examples and tips that the students could use to assist in writing the different parts of their essays (intro, body paragraphs, conclusion). The resources he chose were both easy to understand and easy for students to access if they needed to hear the information multiple times, or if they just needed a review. His use of the internet and access to reviewable information provided the ELs opportunities to listen/watch the information multiple times. However, to better serve the ELs in the class, I would have presented key academic vocabulary before giving the lesson had the students work with the new words while doing an exercise similar to English 12 class, where the students identify (and maybe label the parts of the essay). This would help the ELs understand the vocabulary, and it would help the rest of the class understand the material before they begin writing. I would also work with the ELs