Observation: A Reflection Of My Experience In The Classroom

#1. The classroom was setup in a traditional style seating arrangement. All of the desks were in rows and were facing forward towards the teacher. There were posters of important American documents like the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Gettysburg Address. There was also a timeline and poster of West Virginia history. There was also a world map and a map of the United States. There was a student computer in the classroom however I never saw it used. There was a small library in the corner of the classroom with the student’s textbooks and a few extra history books. The teacher had an ELMO, SMARTBOARD, and computer that he utilized. There were no official seating arrangements and kids set in whatever seats they wanted. They did sit in their

The student that I observed had a few problems with non-structured and group centered activities. In the traditional setup of the instruction, the student would randomly make noises or speak up while the teacher was talking. The students would pressure the student into making him feel as if he was doing something wrong. Sometimes they would tell him to stop making noises. There was one time that the student started crying when one of his classmates told him to stop. In group centered activities, the student would act up and his peers would tell him to calm down. I believe that he did better in group centered activities because it allowed him to talk with his peers which was something he had trouble with in non-structured activities. Even though the peers group was pressuring the student at times, they did accept the student. They would talk to him, discuss the topics of the lesson, and talk about his interests. When the student did get to self-select a group, he often sat alone and did not interact with any of his peers. I saw this happen a lot when the teacher used the computer lab for instruction. The student would talk a lot with the teacher and myself more than his

I worked on the student’s writing skills in the second session. I had the student to look up a current event in the computer lab. The student was to summarize the story in one paragraph and then respond and reflect on what he thought about the article. There were times where he would get distracted by what other students were doing and he would often be on task. I was able to use the broken record technique to have him stay on task. He really liked the story that he had chosen to write about because he thought it was really funny. The student was able to write a better response on the current event than what he did on the test. He had problems with running on sentences and not creating non-fragmented sentences. In this session he was able to write 5 separate sentences for each of the two paragraphs. Before he would have had two long, run-on sentences for