FALL CLASSROOM OBSERVATION GUIDE
MIT 2005-2007

 

(formated for word)

Week 1: The Context	Week 2: The Dialogue	Week 3: Instructional Strategies	Visual Map of Field Journal Entries (in word)

 

 

 

Field Observation Etiquette

• Be sure to be on time. School principals, secretaries and teachers have a lot to do, and we don't want to abuse their hospitality by creating extra work. At least for the first week that each group (A,B,C) goes to a new school, wait until most or all of your colleagues are present and go in together.

• When you enter a school building always go directly to the office and sign in using that building's procedures.  Typically this will include your wearing an identification badge before you go to your classroom.  (Not all schools have a badge type system).  Don't forget to sign out when you leave the school as well.

• Remember, you will be observing in trios at each site. In the Fall quarter, you will visit each site 3 times; an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school.  Your observation period will be a half day, beginning at the start of your teacher’s day and ending at 11am.  You will need to take the time at the end of your morning to complete your observation reflections in your journal.
  
  
• Do not sit next to fellow MIT students in the classroom. If you are able, sit in different parts of the room with different views of the classroom. If it ever seems possible, try to sit at the front of the room sometimes so that you can see students’ faces.

• In order to explain your presence in the classroom, ask the teacher to introduce you to the students in the class. Let them know that you are also students who are learning about teaching. Also, let the teacher know what kinds of things you will be observing each day.

• Do not initiate conversation with the children, nor interfere as they do their work. If the children engage you, be polite but not engaging. If you avoid most individual eye contact, scan the room as you observe and take notes, the students probably will ignore you after they get used to your being there. Remember, this quarter your task is to focus on observing and taking notes.

• You may see things in the classroom that you don't agree with. These observations will give you your first chance to control your body language -- your non-verbal responses. If you see something you are uncomfortable with, describe it in your journal and don't discuss it with anyone but the MIT faculty. Remember you are a guest, not a classroom parent nor a paid evaluator.

• You’ll notice in the weekly guidelines, questions to ask the teacher.  Check in with the teacher for a convenient time to pose these questions and talk for about 5 minutes. 

• At the end of each observation session, plan to meet with your observation partners for 20 to 30 minutes. Go out of the school, and find a spot to have a cup of coffee and debrief what you each saw and what questions you may have. Note alternate interpretations your partners bring to the same situation. For example, maybe I thought the teacher was angry and aggressive in giving directions, my observation partner may have interpreted that same interaction as the teacher being clear and direct. After each observation and reflection, write down a question or two about teaching, learning, and schooling that arises from your observation. We will share these during computer lab time.

• At the end of your 3 weeks at one school, be sure to let the teacher know how much your appreciated your opportunity to observe. A note or card is always appropriate. If you can think of one or two things that you learned or thought were particularly good, let the teacher know.
  
  
• It is important to appreciate that these teachers are being generous to let us come in and observe. It is easy for outsiders and people new to the profession to be highly critical of what is going on in the classroom. While we want you to reflect deeply on the relationship between teaching, learning, and schooling, it is not appropriate to be negatively critical of the teachers we visit. We don’t know their circumstances, and teaching is a very complex profession.
  
  
• You are bound by confidentiality and must not discuss anything you hear or see in the classroom with people outside the program.  Do not have conversations with your peers in public places where you may be overheard.  You never know if the teacher’s best friend or the parent of a child is sitting near you.

Here's to a great experience!

 

 

Fall Classroom Observation Guide

These formal classroom observation tasks will help you to focus directly on the classroom environment, which includes the physical arrangement and teacher -- student interactions.  Rather than engaging in teaching or tutoring experiences, which may limit focused observation, these tasks promote very centered looking, listening and reflecting experiences. 

Record your observations in a journal devoted exclusively to this assignment.  Observation journals contribute to the structure and content of the Thursday technology sessions and Friday observation discussions.

You will be using the observation guidelines below on Thursday mornings at each of the three school sites: elementary, middle school and high school. You may observe and record events in addition to those listed below, but this format will assure that you have observations that can be compared with those of your colleagues, and we can learn from each others’ experiences in a thoughtful way.  Be sure to leave enough pages in-between each observation for your regularly written reflections, and for your response to the reflections of others in your seminar.

A central goal for your observations is learning the differences among descriptions, interpretations, and evaluations. Further, we want you to become aware of your own interpretations and evaluations, and those that are informed by the research literature and our MIT community.

Interrupt your journal descriptions at any time with an asterisk (*) or some such sign, and write down at once anything to which you strongly react -- it may make you feel uncomfortable, surprised, alarmed, shocked, delighted, sad, happy. These are important reactions, because they will contain messages about your own perceptions. It is important to go back to your notes and reflect what you were responding to and why.

We will collect your journals on Fridays.

WEEK ONE AT EACH OBSERVATION SITE

Classroom Context- Record the following information for each classroom you visit in your journal.

• School setting - urban/rural/suburban
  
• Grade level - single grade/ multi-grade classroom
  
• Number of students and number of teachers
  
• Profile of students - boys/girls; race/ethnic profile of students (best guess); second language speakers; other visible or audible differences e.g. wheelchairs. You can also access the OSPI report card website http://reportcard.ospi.k12.wa.us/Default.aspx to gather additional information about the school including socio-economic class of students looking at the percent of students on “free or reduced lunch.”
   

 

The Physical Environment

Journal Format: Draw a vertical line down the center of your paper to make two columns. The left column is for descriptions of the physical environment. The right column is for your interpretations of what you have described. 

 

Include these basic observations and descriptions:  A brief "grand tour" description of the school as a cultural scene.  What do you see and hear as a first time visitor of the school and class?  Describe the building, the halls, things on the walls in the halls, the lunchroom, the library, the office.  What do you see? What do you hear?  Who do you see as you move about the building?  

The physical environment of the classroom: Make a drawing of the room layout: size, location and arrangement of student and teacher desks or tables; shelves and other large equipment; windows and doors. When the teacher is free to talk with you, ask about why he/she decided to arrange the room as he/she did. Take note of the teacher’s response. What do you think are the opportunities and limitations of the physical space?

The walls: Once again, draw a vertical line down the center of your paper to make two columns. The left column is for descriptions of the walls. The right column is for interpretations of your descriptions. In the left hand column, write descriptions of classroom and building walls and other surfaces including: student work, commercial posters, lists of rules, reward charts, photos, display cases, plants, holiday pictures, etc. What is the visible curriculum in the school and classroom? In the right hand column of interpretation and evaluation, describe what you think the teacher might be trying to do given his/her selections? What messages do you get from these artifacts? Who might feel most included in this setting? What/who is normalized? What thinking do students bring to the school about learning, and how could they conceptualize the building as a resource for learning?
 

Personal Responses to the Cultural Scene

Written Reflections: After you leave the school, take some time to write reflections about your observations. Pay attention to any responses you have to the school, the classroom, what is being done and what is being said. If you do not have any strong responses, this could indicate that the environmental context matches your expectations or experiences so it appears ‘normal.’ What does that mean? Who may experience it differently?

Note: When you are reflecting on your observation, it is important that you begin with your own reflections prior to talking with your observation partners. Your ideas and insights are likely to be different from each others’. We want you to preserve your personal interpretations and conceptions long enough to get them out on paper. Convergence to shared perceptions among your MIT colleagues can happen quite quickly, with a glance, a nod, or a few words.

WEEK TWO AT EACH OBSERVATION SITE   

Observation and Description of Student-Teacher Dialogue 

In week two of your observations at each site, you will be focusing on student-teacher dialogue during whole group interactions. This is a partner activity where you and your observation partners will need to attend to different things and then share notes following the observation. 

One MIT student-teacher (or 2 – if there are 4 of you) will create a map of teacher and student contributions to the whole class. Using your notes from the previous week’s observation, design an observation chart ahead of time that will make your recording of observations more efficient.

• Map out the desks and the teacher location.
• Label each desk with numbers 1, 2, 3 to indicate students (rather than assigning pseudonyms).
• Indicate whether each student is a boy or girl and whether a student is of color or white. Your notation could look like: 9BW (indicating student number 9 is a boy who is white.)
• Locate the teacher in the room as well.
• Make Xerox copies of this map for yourself and the colleagues who are observing with you.  Give each of your colleagues a copy of this map before you start this observation.

Your job on the actual observation day is to draw lines from person to person, mapping the order of the conversation.  Attach this mapping to your journal.

The other two MIT student-teachers will have copies of the map provided by their colleague as a reference.  You will set this map on your desk next to where you are taking notes as a reference page. You will individually document the dialogue both between teacher and students, and among students.  

Journal Format: To prepare for this documentation of the dialogue, create several pages in your journal as a T-chart. On the left hand side you will note what the teacher says. On the right hand side you will note what the students say. Keep a running journal of the questions and comments made by the teacher and students. When the dialogue is slow enough, note which student is speaking (referring to the class map you developed prior to class).  

Do this for at least 2 whole class discussions you witness in each school. Make sure to switch jobs with your field partners for each discussion. Make sure to note what class is being observed (i.e. 2^nd grade science, 2^nd grade reading, Period 2 highly capable social studies, etc.) Make a copy of your partners’ work and tape or glue it into your journal for your own records.

Ask the Teacher:  

“What did you want students to learn today? Do you feel that they learned it?”  Summarize what the teacher said in your journal.  Then write a reflection on whether your perceptions align with what the teacher said. 

 

Examine the Dialogue

Journal Format: Draw a line down the center of your page for your reflections:

• On the left hand side, write about what you noticed about the patterns in student-teacher dialogue as it is mapped out. Who is engaged in the conversation? What does the map look like? (Please be descriptive[1] rather than interpretive or evaluative.)
  
• On the right hand side, note your corresponding interpretations.  How do you interpret the dialogue patterns from the map? What do you think is going on and why might that be reasonable? What concerns arise for you as you examine this map? What insights do you bring to this from your readings?  What beliefs or filters of your own do you think are causing you to make the interpretations in this way?

 

Discourse Analysis:  Now look at the words in the discourse, in particular, times when teachers are posing questions to students and students are responding to those questions.

• Researchers have identified one common questioning interaction: Inquiry-Response-Evaluation (IRE). This is where a teacher poses a question (inquiry), a student responds to the question, and the teacher evaluates the correctness of the student’s response. In your notes, use a different colored pen or pencil to bracket off segments of the conversation that follow the IRE pattern. Do the questions call for yes/no and short answer responses? Looking over the IRE patterns, interpret what level of thinking or reasoning was required for the student to provide the responses. High –medium –low? [For example, if a teacher asks a 5^th grader, “Is the word ‘dancing’ a noun or a verb?” we would say that requires a low level of thinking or reasoning. The student would simply follow a rule for identifying the part of speech. Or if a teacher asks students to give a response to a question where the answer comes directly from a textbook, that would also be low-level. On the other hand, if students are working on the concept of fraction addition and the teacher asks a student what kind of representation they can use to show that ¼ + ¼ = ½ rather than 2/8, that requires a higher level of thinking and reasoning.]
  
  
• Now that you’ve identified examples of IRE dialogues, look through and identify other kinds of questions the teacher poses.  Bracket off these other episodes.  Ask yourself:

-       Is the teacher seeking to clarify student thinking? Is the teacher probing for a more substantive response? Is the teacher leading students to a correct response?

-       Is the teacher asking students to describe steps/ processes, or provide more complex reasoning behind ideas and responses?

-       What level of thinking or reasoning was required for students’ responses to those questions? High-medium- low?

Written Reflection on the Analysis:  What insights do you have about questioning in general? Where do you see examples of students learning important ideas through the dialogue? Where do you see examples when students were likely reflecting what the teacher wanted to hear, but not deepening their understanding?

 

**Remember** After each observation and reflection, write down a question or two about teaching, learning, and schooling that arises from your observation. We will share these during computer lab time.

 

WEEK THREE AT EACH OBSERVATION SITE

Description, Reactions to, and Interpretation of Instructional Strategies and Tasks

 

Journal Format:

Using vertical lines, divide your paper in thirds for these observations and reflections:

• Label the left hand column Descriptions.  Label the middle column Reactions, and the last column Interpretation based on Theoretical Models. 

• In the Description column, identify the teaching model(s) being used and write notes about what you observe (see the different types of strategies described below).
  
• In the Reactions column, make notes about your reactions, feelings, beliefs about things such as:  (i) usefulness of the strategy and assignment; (ii) intent of the teacher; (iii) attitude of the students; (iv)your personal attitude to the work.

• In the Interpretation Based on Theoretical Models column, relate what you are learning through our texts to what you are seeing in the classroom.  For example, do strategies seem to be explained by Piagetian, Vygotskian, Skinnerian or Eriksonian perspectives?  Why?

 

Ask the Teacher: 

After your observations, ask the teacher, “What did you want students to learn today?”  Did your perceptions match the teachers’ statements?  What’s your hunch about why or why not?

Analyze Types of Instructional Strategies and Academic Tasks

In this observation we would like you to identify the key instructional strategy (or strategies) the teacher is using during each class period. It might be one of the following:

•  Whole group direct instruction by the teacher: i.e., teaching content by lecturing in front of the whole class:
  
• Teaching consulting, i.e., the teacher consults with a small group of students about a project they are working on;
  
• Small group work, i.e., small groups of children are investigating something together , each student is writing up or drawing something about their own work;
  
• Cooperative group work, i.e., small groups are working toward a common goal.  The students make a plan about their investigation together, then each student takes a particular task responsibility toward the cooperative goal;
  
• Collaborative problem-solving in small groups, i.e., teacher presents a problem to a small group of students and they attempt to solve it together;
  
• Problem-posing and group exploration, i.e., teacher poses a problem and small groups explore process, content, goals and resolution, then return to the entire group for a sharing or debriefing session;
  
• Individual student-selected study, i.e., a student chooses a study of interest and works alone at a computer, at a classroom center, or at his or her desk;
  
•  Teacher directed class discussion or media/film instruction.

 

You will see many other strategies, as well.  Describe them in terms of who sets the tasks (student or teacher), size of group, nature of the task. Also note if all students usually do the same thing or different activities take place simultaneously.

• What is the teacher doing? What are students doing? How does participation differ from student to student? (Note the numbers of students participating in various ways. It is easy to incorrectly make broad claims about student participation that actually applies to only a few students.)
  
• Describe the main task students are expected to engage in during the class.
  
• How does the teacher set up the task with students to encourage all kids to participate? Has the teacher done some prior work so that students know how they are supposed to behave while working on the task? Are these habituated or apparently new to the students? Is each student accountable for the work or is it possible for few students to participate and others can be passive?

Written Reflection on Instructional Strategies,  Tasks,  Student Participation and Your Reactions.

•  What does the teacher do to involve all students in the learning? To what degree can some students be passive in class while others engage actively? In what ways are individual students accountable for their own learning? How are students accountable to each other? What seems to be working? What is not working according to your image of what should be happening?
  
•   What do you believe is the learning goal of the lesson? Is there a relationship between the type of task the teacher gives the students and the instructional strategy used? Consider whether the goal is to develop skills, make sense of ideas, develop hypotheses, etc.
  
•   Now pay attention to the feelings, reactions and attitudes column.  Consider the relationship between your reactions and your conclusions about student involvement, accountability, teacher effectiveness, etc.   It’s important, for example, to consider the degree to which we have interpreted and evaluated a particular situation through our own cultural lenses.   So what are your cultural filters and what’s your hunch about how they effect your interpretations of classroom events?