Student Interaction Outside of the Classroom

There are many actions that teachers need to take to narrow the student-teacher relationship gap. However, teachers are not students’ best friends, they don’t know everything about their students’ life and struggles, but friends do. Student interaction is a key variable in determining the best teaching methods. In order to know/understand how students interact, we must use the reflective cycle, to observe how students talk, act, and respond to each other in their comfort zone, or simply outside of the classroom. For example, we must observe how students interact before school, during lunchtime and afterschool. Observers/teachers rely on the see/describe and analyze phases of the reflective cycle because it helps them concentrate their efforts to students’ learning, how students’ lives and experiences affect their learning; this gives teachers a plan to help improve their learning (Rodgers, 2002). As a student teacher, I observed students before school, during lunchtime and after school at Eleanor Roosevelt High School, for approximately 2 hours total. I will expand on what I observed during the first part of this paper. In the second part, I will connect my observation to the articles we read in class. Finally, the third part will focus on my own experience as a student teacher.

Part I: Observation

Before School

Roosevelt High was extremely quiet at 7:00AM, 40 minutes before first period was supposed to start. Several students walk in slowly with purses and binders, backpacks and duffle bags. As students first enter the school, they face 2 set of tables with a bell tower in between them. On the two tables closest to the gate, two groups of students were sitting and talking, cheerleaders and football players, all dressed in t...

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.... In addition, as I conducted my observation, I tried to blend in with students as I felt that was the only way I could observe them acting naturally. This helped me hear certain anecdotes and even language that students usually don’t say around educators. Overall, school observations are important to student teachers in that it reminds them that they should understand students’ thinking and ideologies in order to teach them without biases or hurtful ideologies.

Works Cited

Milner, H. R. (2010). A diversity and opportunity gaps explanatory framework. Start where you

are, but don’t stay there: Understanding diversity, opportunity gaps, and teaching in today’s classrooms (pp. 13-44). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Rodgers, C. (2002). Seeing student learning: Teacher change and the role of reflection. Harvard

Educational Review, 72(2), pages 230-253.