Week 6,
Assignment: 5 Journal Entries
FIELD
OBSERVATION JOURNAL
6/3/2019
THE
CLASSROOM ENVIRONMENT
The classroom
environment is warm and welcoming for the students in an everyday basis. There
are 25 students in this class, a general education teacher and a teacher
assistant. The special aid teacher comes in few hours daily and helps 4
students that need special assistance. The students sit in tables with groups
of 4 (one table has 5) and rotate every week, so that they have different
groups members to work with every week. The classroom has 7 lap top computers
and centers are set up around the classroom. The tables are in the middle of
the classroom. The classroom has a pretty rich word wall that the students
visit and enrich every day. There is also a reading center where students sit
in groups of 4 or 5, math manipulatives center, behavior management chart,
library with many books classified according to the level of the students, and
smart board.
6/7/2019
SMALL
GROUPS
The teachers
utilize the small group techniques as the best way to provide effective
instruction. The groups are usually formed based on the learning abilities and
level of the students for some subjects, while for other subjects they will
change groupmates so they can enjoy everyone’s company. They rotate groupmates
weekly for some of the subjects. The teacher provides instruction for the class
in general in most of the subjects, and then she and the teacher assistant
works with every group to make sure that the instruction major elements were
absorbed by the students. They will provide extra instruction in every group or
student as needed. The research or work assigned is then announced in general
and the same technique as above is followed with the groups/students that need
additional assistance. Quite often, the work of each group is shared /
presented to the class and students are invited to evaluate the work of the
other groups or classmates.
6/11/2019
TECHNOLOGY
The classroom
is equipped with a smart board that the teachers use in almost every subject
that they teach and work with the students. There are 7 laptop computers in the
classroom that the students use for research or assignment completion. Each
student has his/her individual account that they access with a password. They
submit their work most of the times in this account that serves as a digital
portfolio of their work. They present it at times and the parents or students
from another class are invited. The teachers use different platforms on audio
readers as well when needed, and especially with two of the students with
learning disabilities (especially in reading).
6/14/2019
DIFFERENTIATION
The teaching
tasks were differentiated in every lesson that I happen to observe. One technique
that drew my attention in this classroom was the one when the teacher sent home
a questionnaire in an effort to gather data about the technology used at home
and outside of the school to the parents of the students in order to gather
more accurate information about the actual exposure of her students to the
technology and media. She then designed carefully the lessons that were
introduced under a very interesting thematic unit called “Technology good /
Technology bad”, where she grouped the students according to the data she had
collected from the questionnaires sent in from the parents. The students worked
with more passion in a subject that was quite close to reality and themselves
and each group presented their projects to the class, parents and students of another
class as well. She then invited the parents on a separate day after the
presentation to help them understand their children’s development and interests
so that together they can work for the best of the kids…at least for the
remainder of this academic year.
6/24/2019
INSTRUCTIONAL
PROCEDURES
The lesson I would
like to mention today is a lesson on ILIAD. They were working on a thematic
unit on mortal and immortal characters of ILIAD for at least a week now. The
teacher started this lesson by asking the students about the names of the characters
(human and gods) that they could recall from the last lessons. She encouraged
them to do some group or independent research through the books, pictures, word
wall and laptops that they have used in the past days while working with this
project. They gathered with the data collected and mentioned all the names they
could remember or recently retrieved from the search. They proceeded then with
reading: they read the sentence, phrase or paragraph that referred to each
character from every available source and tried to figure out whether each
character was mortal or immortal. Some of the sources were videos and they
enjoyed those as well. Then the teacher presented them with a big chart with
columns referring to the character, type (mortal, immortal) and evidence. Writing
all this info (one at a time or simultaneously 2-3 students at a time, as the
chart was quite big) took place. They were eager to record as much as they
could. They transferred all this info in a digital chart then and an art
project followed: they used characteristics from the ILIAD characters to create
their own. Some students were so inspired that they decided to design their own
shields, based on Achilles’ shield.
