Field Experience Week 5

In my week five field experience I did not get to teach, but I was able to observe a few different classes and interview students for Barton's class. I observed my teacher, teach an entire class for the first time completely this semester (since I have been teaching a portion each week). It was good to see his use materials in the classroom and see how he put together an entire class. The students started with watching the Channel 1 video, which is a video put out everyday by a educational teen news station over current events going on today. Our teacher stopped the video periodically to talk to the class about what was going on and get some type of discussion going. There was also a story on the presidential campaign and he pulled up an interactive map that tracked the electoral votes and each state a particular candidate was suppose to be winning. After that current event lesson, the students went through vocabulary multiple choice questions with the teacher. They corresponded to a vocabulary sheet they were suppose to be looking up and finding definitions for in the last class. The teacher went through each answer with them and tried to explain some certain words. After that our teacher has power point slides that he uses on his smart board. Each slide corresponds to a question on a packet that each student gets at the beginning of the Unit. While it seems that he is just giving students the answer he does take time to try and talk about each question or prompt from the packet individually. I do think there are some people or items from the history lesson that deserve more than just one powerpoint slide in a lesson, but I am not sure of the restrictions and time pressures on the teacher to cover material. After about 10 slides and questions were completed the students watched a video that was sped up of a boat going through the Panama Canal today, which was interesting. Many students did not know how locks worked in a canal system, which I was able to explain. After this students completed a map worksheet on national parks and natural resources in the United States during Teddy Roosevelt's time as President. I felt that this worksheet was more of just a filler activity.

During the worksheet time in two of the three U.S. History classes Kasie and I were able to pull out two students for our interviews. We showed students different pictures of historical moments in U.S. History and asked them to pick what they thought were the most important three. We then asked questions why they picked each picture, if there were other events that they did not see in our pictures they thought were important, and what they would like to learn more about. We then examined their thoughts on a picture about the Civil Rights Movement and the American Revolution. I was impressed with the answers from both groups of students and how they viewed important events in History. It seems that hardly any of them were concerned with any history that occurred pre-1900. However, we also asked questions about teaching in the classroom. I thought when I posed a question about if they would like doing some type of project based learning, all of the students said they did not think that would work and no one would do anything if they were allowed to go off and collect and research information on a topic. That was very surprising to me.

During the last class, Kasie and I were able to observe a Honors U.S. History course. The differences between this class and the classes we have been in is astounding. The teacher easily controls the classroom and the class has meaningful discussions. They ask questions about the reading and all are willingly to participate. The teacher had the class take one hour to get into groups and produce a multi-sectioned newspaper from the early 1900s that focused on American Imperialism and yellow journalism. All of the students split into groups and worked pretty well even asking us many questions to clarify how they should complete the assignment. I know in the classes we have it is hard to even get students to split into groups, not even trying to get them to think critically or produce intellectual work. It was definitely an eye opening experience.