Smithfield School Case Study

School Context: The Smithfield School is part of The School District of Philadelphia that serves 563 students in the grades from K-8. Smithfield student body is 80.2% African American, 5% White, 6.1% Asian, 1.4% Latino and 7.3% others. At the Smithfield School, 100% of the students are CEP Economically Disadvantaged (eligible for free lunch), during this school year (2014-2015). When it comes to school attendance the students had a academic school average of 93.2% and the teachers school attendance average was 88.4% compare to 93.4% among the School District of Philadelphia schools in 2013-2014. Smithfield had 47 suspensions during the 2013-2014 school year this number increase on the past two school years. When it came to incidents at

Williams it’s very busy with learning stuff everywhere. The classroom has different section called ‘centers’ like the library. In the middle is where the desk are placed they are grouped into 5-6 student at each table. I immediately noticed some negative behavior management on the part of the teacher by yelling at the students that wasn’t listening to her instructions. Another behavior management tool that doesn’t seems to work completely well was the point system that give or take a point from any student based on their behavior or action throughout the day. Most students seem to not be so thrilled or fazed by losing a point or when they gained one. But the teacher used this system quite frequent to make her point and take action. An action taking by the teacher that I felt was problematic is when she questioned a student that was better behaved, if another student was misbehaving. This action could lead to negative behavior for child-child interaction and

One thing I did notice about Christopher was since he tends to be very detail with his work, causing him to fall behind at times completing task not because he doesn’t know the material but because he’s slow at completing the work. This dysfunction can give the wrong impression that he doesn’t get or know the work given to him. Another dysfunction I noticed was that he isn’t very social with his classmates, but very friendly and willing to communicate with me while I’m there. In fact he is the only student initially to become excited when I come to the classroom. The impression I get is that he is a loner and mostly by default, but doesn’t quite know how to open up completely and communicate with others on him own. When he is doing his work or on the carpet for group learning he spaces out from the group, but if you weren’t directly paying attention to him you wouldn’t notice because he is very quiet, this can be a risk factor in his communication development. I observed during my last visit in creative drawing time Christopher continuously was drawing a man laying on the ground with x’s in their eyes and with red crayon markings underneath them. This symbolize that the man was dead, and obviously was killed by another person. I tried to inquire about why he was drawing such pictures, he just laughed and said cause… It concerns me about he’s